Innovation for Education

My photo of Connecticut Ave Sunday night We need better crap detection now . On Sunday afternoon, I walked to Little Red Fox, my favorite DC cafe, to get a sandwich. It's a weekend ritual for me. About thirty minutes after I left the place, police had the block barricaded and patrons in all the nearby restaurants were on lockdown. A nut with an assault rifle was threatening diners at Comet Ping Pong, a pizza place right next door to my lunch cafe. Today I found out that this incident, one I very nearly was a part of, made the New York Times: In Washington Pizzeria Attack, Fake News Brought Real Guns To me this is yet more evidence that we desperately need better "crap detection". This isn't something that has implications some day down the road. This is relevant right now. People with misguided ideas about how the world works, motivated by completely fictional news, are taking to the streets to act, sometimes aggressively in response to what they read. The wor

I really enjoyed Howard Gardner's book The App Generation. I read it during breaks at work, stopping to highlight passages I thought were important, and I found myself highlighting quite a bit. Gardner's ideas about this young generation's unique characteristics, skills, challenges and habits really resonated with me. There is so much discussion right now about what the app world is doing to our attention, biases, habits, social interactions and relationships. This world is new, and we're just figuring it out. Some of what he described I could relate to; some I had observed in my own students and even in my peers. Some of this stuff mirrors what I'd read in other books on similar subjects. One great book in the same vein is comedian Aziz Ansari's book Modern Romance . If you haven't read this book yet, I can't recommend it enough. Not only is it filled with Ansari's lovable charm and hilarious wit, but he wrote it with sociologist Eric Klinenber

I'd like to begin this week's reflection by saying that I think this is one of the most important books we've read so far. Howard Rheingold's text is a dense research-filled tome about the various personal, social, psychological and societal impacts of our use of the Internet. His goal is to lay out for us the ways we might become more effective users and participants in the net-saturated world. People used to say things like "get ready, because soon technology will be all around us." Well, I feel strongly that it's time to put adages like that behind us. That time is already here. I'm typing this reflection into a self-publishing platform called blogger, one of the earliest blog platforms that's still going strong at 17 years old -  an impressive pedigree for any Internet medium. If Blogger were one of my students, it would be old enough to take its driver's test. As I type this I'm using a Smartphone app called Grubhub to order Chinese

I found this great TED Talk this week about how play often leads to innovation. http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_how_play_leads_to_great_inventions#t-433198

This week I learned that there is a ton of confusion among educators about the issue of using copyrighted materials. In her book Copyright Clarity , Renee Hobbs says that a lot of teachers misunderstand or choose not to understand the law and their rights, and this has a detrimental effect on classroom education. I'd studied this stuff aeons ago in film school at Temple University (where author and educator Renee Hobbs founded the Media Education Lab). There I'd heard a lot about media literacy - about the way media messages are deliberately constructed, and how they can be used to shape and influence public opinion and even the outcomes of elections! It's so important for teachers to be able to communicate this to their students - to teach them that their world is full of messages - on billboards, on TV, on cereal boxes, on the Internet. Everything they read or see is produced by someone with an opinion, a message and particular a bias. It's so important, now mor

Those of you who are busy evaluating web sources this week will be intrigued and entertained by this video. These are the testimonies of people who were present at the assassination of JFK - or are they? http://www.clickhole.com/video/these-people-were-there-when-kennedy-was-shot-and--5090

Good day readers! This week I was tasked with developing a checklist for evaluation of web resources. I used the drawing and web processing tools in Google Drive and published my work with Google Sites. After referring to several web resources and teacher pages with recommendations for evaluating web content, I synthesized these into my own simple checklist. I then used this checklist to evaluate five web sites and two videos. Please forgive the spartan look of my Google site. I found Google's editing interface to be severely counterintuitive. The result of my efforts is here: Zack's DooDLeS

It can be hard to make diet and exercise a priority when you’re working full time and taking graduate courses, but I know how important it is, so I’ve been trying to make improvements. I’ve been trying to work on my physical fitness by putting more exercise into my schedule and by making healthier choices about what I eat. Most week days I drive 45 minutes to an office where I sit for eight and a half hours, only to return to my car for another 45 minutes to an hour of sitting. That’s 10 hours of being sedentary in a day, not including what I do when I come home. When I come home I’m usually tired, and succumb to the lure of more lounging or even a nap. I did some reading on the subject, and learned that sitting has an extremely detrimental effect on one’s physical fitness and stamina, especially when coupled with a diet containing an embarrassing number of microwave pizzas and Chinese takeout. I discovered recently that I have been taking in a lot of fat and sugar, and these can le

Jason K. McDonald’s article The Creative Spirit of Design seems to me to be a call for flexibility on the part of the designing educator, and an abandonment of rigid formulas and patterns. As teachers we know that the classroom environment, and many other learning environments are fluid, fickle places. What works in the 8am section of a class might not work after lunch. What works for AP Language students might not be applicable to English Language Learners. We as educators need to be adaptable and open to what McDonald calls the “creative spirit of design”. This has several characteristics: First, McDonald stresses that imagination is an important component of design. Teachers need to be able to imagine not only what is tried and tested, but also what hasn’t been tried and might work within a given context. He says that we need to operate at the very limits of our imagination. When I read this section I thought back to the original innovators who tested early prototypes o

I don’t know if it’s my recent decision to go off coffee, the exhaustion of my heavier than normal load at work, but when I approached “Affordance Analysis - Matching Learning Tasks with Learning Technologies” I found it completely inscrutable. I sat, in the silent stacks at the library, hoping that somehow my highlighter would magically sense what was important in this piece. I found it really challenging, and silently hoped that this impenetrable prose was not to be the academic norm. I remember the dismay with which my British Literature students approached Milton’s Paradise Lost and suddenly completely understood how they’d felt. I put “Affordance Analysis” away for a few days and came back to it at a different place and time of day. When I gave it another chance, eventually some sense began to emerge. I still found it difficult to parse , but I was starting to make some sense of it. What I understand was that Mr. Bower was simply trying to present a method for matching tech

As I read Standage's The Victorian Internet, I was amazed at how much the ascendance of the telegraph in the 19th century mirrors the rise of the Internet in the 20th. Like many innovations, telegraph technology was utilized for something other than its intended purpose. And, as with many innovations, it was misunderstood by many. Sending messages to distant locales over wires must have seemed like magic to those with little scientific expertise. The long line of inventors and scientists who contributed to its development had a hard time convincing the government, the military, and the general populace to adopt it for widespread use, but when it caught on it spread like wildfire, and became as ubiquitous as mobile phones are today. In the heyday of the telegraph it was used to order military maneuvers, to conduct business, to send money, to order clothing, to maintain relationships and to solemnify marriages. It created a new careers and a new subculture with its own rituals, in-

What did I learn? I learned a lot. Vygotsky's Mind in Society  was a challenge, but there was a lot to take away from it. First, symbols are tools that enable cognition. This separates us from even the highest functioning of our ape relatives. Internalization is the process whereby learners come to know symbols and begin appropriating them. Children engage in what Piaget called egocentric speech. They talk to themselves to aid in solving problems. As they grow, this process becomes internal, and they no longer need to talk through problems. They can conceptualize and visualize things that lie outside their immediate field. Contrary to previous models held by psychologists, development happens gradually and in stages with some types of development overlapping others. Students, as they grow and learn, progress through proportional thinking, operational thinking, pre-conceptual thinking, formal operations, and if they advance far enough, complex thinking. The zone of prox

Yours truly paddling the Ammer River in Southern Bavaria I can see why Brown, Collins and Duguid's Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning  is a seminal text for anyone studying the ways people learn. This paper, from 1989 makes a lot of sense to me. I imagine I'll hold onto this one so that I can refer to it in the future. The authors explain that learning is situated , or contextually dependent and that students learn best when the skills and knowledge they're presented with are learned within the context of that learning culture. The acquisition of knowledge is compared to learning the use of tools. Practitioners of various crafts make use of tools specific to their trades. Students who want to learn to use these tools should do so by using them correctly and within their appropriate contexts. The authors state that most learning that happens in schools is set in and appropriate for the culture of school. But real life isn't like school. In order for stu

Stacey and others wrote great comments on my "pickle" post from last week. As I started to respond, my reply started to get pretty long. I decided to post it here rather than in the comments because it takes up so much space. This week, Stacey wrote: Hey Zach! I love the questions you ask, and that we need to ask as teachers, and I feel like we all do a fairly good job of answering them for ourselves and in our groups. The one concept I can't really get past is making students into productive, contributing members of society. We need welders, garbage men, factory workers, yet our school systems have a way of degrading manual labor careers. Those are necessary, productive people, but we feel like unless we have at least one college degree we aren't valuable. My reply is as follows: Stacey, I’m going to reply to your comment here, because I want to address your points and respond to your observations and conclusions on our readings.  First, I think you rai

After reading Brown, Collins and Duguid's "Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning" (1989), take my Kahoot quiz here .

This week I added a second design principle to my bag. This is the Ends Principle . It goes something like this: Good learning designs prepare learners to meet community needs by linking living and learning to the PICKLE (problem-solving, information using, community participation, knowledgeable, literate, ethical decision-making). This week I contemplated the notion that good learning design requires identification of a specific  problem . No one can come up with a solution before they know what problem they're trying to solve. Before an educator can even begin to address the nitty-gritty what will happen in their classroom, they have to ponder what they want the outcome to be. What will the students take away from this class? What kinds of learning are important? What will make my students better people? What kinds of things will they need to be responsible, productive members of society? This means-justified-by-the-end thinking sounds Machiavellian, but it's just what

This week I investigated everyday items in my life that were designed. Here is what I found: I also investigated the websites of a few education organizations. Here is what I found. Education Websites

Greetings! I'll use this blog to record my reflections for EDIT 780 - Principles of School-based Design. Our exploration of school-based design begins with the notion that teachers are designers. It's difficult to imagine life in the modern world without design. The buildings in which we work and live and the cars that take us back and forth between them are all thoughtfully crafted by designers. These people put effort into making sure some raw materials come together to achieve a purpose. I do believe in teachers as designers, and the end result - the purpose they aim to achieve - is student learning and achievement. This week I learned that planning and designing are not the same thing. A planner may arrange the materials they have at hand, but a designer starts from scratch, crafting an entire experience (car, building, garden) from scratch. When I think of the teacher as designer, I think of my mentor teacher Mr. Thimons. He was a teacher who believed strongly in the v