Energy expended

Joy wilted

By the heat

Too hot to play anymore

Too tired to care

Creativity crushed

And stories smeared

Like sidewalk chalk

In the “Reign” of Tears

Dissertations are such bullies.

This blog has been woefully neglected since I began “dissertating.”  I haven’t the energy to do any more academic writing at the moment, but am finding my personal blog to be a good way to maintain some creative balance.  Hence, this professional blog will be the equivalent of an abandoned playground for at least another month or so.

My student teachers are now, officially, my colleagues–and very deserving of that title, if I do say so myself! They bring a tremendous amount of creativity to the profession, as this parody about their internship experience based on the One Semester of Spanish Love Song will attest!They are also filled with initiative and enthusiasm, as evidenced by the fact that after learning about (and living) True Colors throughout the year, they had these shirts made!

For those of you who don’t know about True Colors, take the True Colors Survey. (It is only 5 questions long. Wait for all the flashing to quit, then drag the numbers into the circles.) When you have finished, mouse over the bar graph that will appear at the end in order to see a very basic interpretation of the results. If you want more details, take a few minutes to read through Jennifer Niskanen’s True Colors Pages. For additional information, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the color(s) that apply to you.

I like to use True Colors because I find that it offers useful perspectives on why relationships in the classroom sometimes break down. It also provides simple, telegraphic language that can be used to address those breakdowns and to sketch out potential solutions.

(This is a visual representation of some of the key characteristics of the various colors.)

Consequently, it was incredibly amusing to me when my colleagues appeared on the last day of class wearing these shirts, and then presented me with one of my own. It captures our journey together very poignantly!

(Team Advanced Low refers to the fact that student teachers are now required to demonstrate that they have achieved Advanced Low Proficiency in the language they intended to teach in order to be certified.)

And I guarantee that although golds may drive their teachers crazy, they make GREAT colleagues. So if you know of a school that needs a creative, enthusiastic, and very responsible language teacher, be sure to add it to our wiki: Job Postings & Job Search Tools!

The typical textbook takes life and decontextualizes it, divides it into pieces that are so small they are
almost unrecognizable as ever having been alive, dehydrates them, and then wonders why students don’t find them appetizing. Why are we so tied to textbooks anyway? (That was a PURELY rhetorical question!)

One of the many things about new technologies that has been particularly powerful for me is the way it has pulled me outside of my own paradigm. The more I play with it, the more my perspective about EVERYTHING changes–and especially with regard to the ways I think about knowledge, learning, teaching, understanding, relationships, and living. It isn’t always comfortable, but it has been SO worth it.

You can then access your account online, view your memos, and listen to a looping audio recording of them as you read the transcripts (which are available almost instantly). You can also share your memos with other users (so students could share the things they’ve recorded with their teacher.) Set-up takes about 15 seconds, the interface is beautiful, it is easy to use, and you can access it online or offline. I’m also intrigued by the promise of a visual component (as they are currently soliciting images that people are using as memory aids).

Aside from its obvious applications as a tool for personal productivity, I think it could be interesting to experiment with it as a way for ESL students to create private, online audio portfolios that they could use to self-evaluate their progress over time. (I tried it in Spanish. It records just fine, but cannot transcribe even the most Americanized Spanish, so you get a lot of gibberish in the written transcriptions.)

For additional ways it might be used both in and out of the classroom, see Liz Kolb’s blog post about it.

My point is three-fold. The first is that the proliferation of information and the speed with which it can be disseminated has resulted in an increasingly acute need for students to leave schools equipped with the cognitive flexibility to adapt to rapid change, the creativity to generate innovative solutions to complex problems, and the transliteracy to create and interpret meaning across cultures, genres, and platforms. Yet, there is little in the children’s sections of our local libraries and bookstores that would build the interest, understandings, or skills from which future innovations in traditional fields could be leveraged, much less in fields like design, environmental sustainability, photonics, or quantum computing. The second is that the majority of teachers lack even basic digital literacies (which might explain why so many of the tools critical to developing them are banned or blocked in most schools) and are therefore ill-equipped to guide students toward suitable alternative resources online. The third is that the presumption that children’s interests are narrow and that their capacity for understanding is limited is a very dangerous one. What’s more, it is often untrue.

In The Little Prince, St. Exupéry lamented the inability of grownups to understand anything of real consequence. I suspect that many of the children I know would heartily agree!

Although mobile devices can certainly be a tremendous disruption (and one that many young teachers are ill-prepared to address), I should also say that from my perspective, the problem has less to do with cell phones/mobile devices and more to do with unquestioned assumptions about what it means to be educated, to teach, and to learn. The increasing availability and ubiquity of mobile technologies like cell phones foregrounds problems that have always existed in education, and makes much more visible the ineffectiveness of longstanding pedagogies that common assumptions about education have reinforced.

For me, school policies against cell phones and other mobile devices are a physical manifestation of beliefs about teaching, learning, and literacy that are not particularly congruent with the rapidly changing society in which we live. They reinforce all sorts of problematic notions such as:

• the idea that learning only happens when it comes through established channels at prescribed times

• the unspoken assumption that teachers are the primary, most authoritative, and best source of information

• the belief that students can only learn (or do) one thing at a time

• the presumption that teachers are most qualified to decide what students learn, and

• the perspective that teachers can and should control learning

They also fail to take into account the fact the writing spaces and tools that “literate” people use are also changing. As people become more adept at working in these spaces, and as the mobile web becomes more functional, it is likely that mobile computing will play an increasingly central role in business, education, entertainment, and industry.

I’m not saying that students don’t need teachers, or that parents and teachers shouldn’t be concerned with the digital dangers (and their physical manifestations) of emerging technologies, or even that technology is a panacea for educational or societal problems. I do think, however, that the world has changed dramatically in the last 50 years, highlighting a desperate need for shifts in the way we think about education.

Instead of reactively seeking ways to eliminate the distraction of cell phones, it would be more useful for schools to think proactively about what makes cell phones so compelling to students, how and why students are using them, and how the concept of “mobile learning” might be used to take all that is good about our present system and make it even better by increasing access to content, to community, and to learning tools/opportunities.

Part of the problem is that most educators aren’t really aware of what cell phones can (or will soon be able to) do. Part of the problem is that unlike many other web 2.0 technologies, cell phones aren’t quite there yet. The larger issue, though, is pedagogy. If your image of what a teacher is and does revolves around images of lecturing, maintaining classroom control, distributing assignments, and grading, it will be hard for you to see the myriad of educational possibilities inherent in social technologies and web 2.0 applications. If your idea of learning involves hands-on, project-based, student-centered activities, then the leap to these same technologies as gateways to educational opportunities and exciting possibilities for engaging what is INSIDE students in the learning process isn’t such a big one. Students are clearly willing to communicate, but are we listening?

There is no question that cell phones are a disruptive technology. They are delivering a wake-up call that is long overdue. We can ignore the beeping alarms that remind us it is time to stop abdicating our responsibility to teach students how to use all new technologies ethically and responsibly, or we can ban them in hopes that the challenges they present to our authority, our effectiveness, our relevance, and our pedagogy will also disappear.

Postscript: I appreciated the opportunity to think about the issue more deeply, but was disappointed by the stance the article in the NY Times took on it:

The poor schoolmarm or master, required to provide a certain amount of value for your child’s entertainment dollar, now must compete with texting, instant-messaging, Facebook, eBay, YouTube, Addcaictinggames.com and other poxes on pedagogy.

One of the many issues at stake here is what counts as pedagogy. If a lecture is the best we can do, then “poxes on pedagogy” that spread widely and rapidly may be our only hope for survival! Of course, we could always try an engagement filter ;-).

The design of the site and the thinking that it reveals are intriguing to me—especially as you explore pages like the reflect/respect page (be sure to watch the video and click on the process images). Note the multiple paths to navigation, the mix of non-linearity and linearity on every page, and the convergence of inquiry with social activism, community engagement, and arts-based education. I also liked the way the site invites you to interact with it, and in the process, helps you to establish a relationship with its author, its content, and its form. You can see and hear Dave’s mind at work (and come to understand more about HOW and WHY it works as it does) as you explore it.

The portfolio is a good example of many of the values of the iGeneration—inter-tainment, identity, individuality, information, innovation, interactivity. It engaged me in considering how our representation of content gets tangled up with our values, and how that influences the ways we choose to represent ourselves personally and professionally. I also couldn’t help but think of the research on cognitive flexibility, complexity, design, engagement, perception, multiple representations, and visual thinking as I was exploring this.

It would be interesting to show this to educators and teacher candidates and ask questions such as:

• What do these ‘products’ reveal about what the person who created them understands? What do they reveal about what he may not have considered? What do they reveal about him professionally? What do they reveal about him personally?

• What kind of experiences could prepare someone to create such products? What kinds of experiences would preclude the development of the skills required to create such products?

• What kind of technological pedagogical content knowledge would be required in order for a teacher to facilitate the development of such products or skills?

• What implications might this have for the kinds of things we do in our classrooms and for the kinds of assignments we give to students (PreK-12, undergraduate, graduate, doctoral)?

• What might this mean for the future of education, as well as for cultural, economic, political, and social contexts?

• What questions should we, as educators, be asking that we currently are not?

Of course, there are many counterarguments. (Incidentally, it would be interesting to see a visual representation of some of them.) There will be many who will find the site overwhelming and who will argue vociferously that it has nothing to do with education, literacy, the future, or the challenges inherent in those endeavors . . . .

For me, however, it is the happiest site I’ve encountered in a very long while–an aesthetically, conceptually, emotionally, and intellectually pleasurable experience.

Slave Part-Equal Duality (An Introduction to Quantum Gradnamics) (On Comps)

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (An Introduction to Quantum Gradnamics) (On the Prospect of Graduation)

Schroedinger’s Cat (An Introduction to Quantum Gradnamics) (On Productivity)

The comics perfectly capture my present “location” in the developmental trajectory of tasks and experiences that comprise doctoral work. They also encapsulate my current thoughts, feelings, and frustrations beautifully, but in a much more witty and sophisticated way than I am capable of at the moment.

I hope you enjoy the truth, the substantive parallels, and the layered meanings as much as I did!