TEX2ALL

Here is a vision to drawn toward like Daedalus…except for the melting and the falling and drowning part.

tellio :: Aug.18.2010 :: Story, coming to terms, philosophy :: No Comments »

Monika Hardy’s evocative post and my response:

curiosity is a natural and beautiful phenomena.
when generously facilitated, learning how to learn becomes the most basic, the most simple, and the most vital of all skills.
unfortunately, in public ed, as we have sought knowledge during an age where that suited us, we find ourselves bound by the very system that we ourselves manufactured to give us opportunity.
now that the ability to facilitate natural curiosity in a public school setting via individualization to infinity per passion/curiosity is possible, most of us are unable to tap into it.
it seems we need a manufactured short term detox/rehabilitation for any that have been through formal schooling, to get us back to the state of and believing in our natural curiosity.
nclb = absolutely
achievement gap = misnomer ..

My response:

I think the operative word for me in your post is “bound”.  And a fascinating word it is, one that swings back and forth like a bell’s brass clapper.  In one sense it means to tie down.  It also means to adjoin. Or perhaps you like it to mean to bounce upward?  How about the covers of a book?  Or feeling obliged toward someone? I like its meaning as a noun that describes the boundaries of a property line–its metes and bounds.

This is going the long way round the barn to say that perhaps we are not bound to but bounding toward some new and better place for learners. To extend the metaphor, in order to bound toward we have to put feet down somewhere. That somewhere is wherever fresh heaven or hell we happen to be working in at that moment.  Otto Scharmer’s book Theory U suggests that if we are listening care-fully we can allow ourselves to be drawn toward an emerging future as we leap.  I don’t mean for this to get fuzzy around the edges, but passion guides these bounds.  We need to know clearly but not too clearly what we want.

Or as Machado writes, we make the road by walking it.

One of the most profound things I have ever read about how to become unbound and how to rebound was written by Myles Horton who said,

“What you must do is go back, get a simple place, move in and you are there.  The situation is there.  You start with this and let it grow.  You know your goal.  It will build its own structure and take its own form. You can go to school all your life, you’ll never figure it out because you are trying to get an answer that can only come from the people in the life situation.” (Horton, 1997, p. 55)

Horton, M. (1997). The Long Haul: An Autobiography. Teachers College Press.

I conclude that we are not bound.  Cut the spider’s web and let your own thread lower you to where you need to be.  Be unbound.

tellio :: Aug.18.2010 :: Educational Common Life, Metaphor, coming to terms, life, philosophy :: No Comments »

Kevin Kelly — KK* Lifestream

“In the network economy, nine times out of ten, your fiercest competitor will not come from your own field. In turbulent times, when little is locked in, it is imperative to search as wide as possible for places where innovations erupt. Innovations increasingly intersect from other domains. A ceaseless blanket search–wide, easy, and shallow–is the only way you can be sure you will not be surprised. Don’t read trade magazines in your field; scan the magazines of other trades. Talk to anthropologists, poets, historians, artists, philosophers. Hire some 17-year-olds to work in your office. Make a habit to visit a web site at random. Tune in to talk radio. Take a class in scenario making. You’ll have a much better chance at recognizing the emergence of something important if you treat these remote venues as neighbors.”

Reading Kevin Kelly’s admonition to cast a wider net into other disciplines comes from the simple observation that many innovations come from outside one’s own field. Revolutions rarely come from within. In that spirit I would like to request that others write a little about the outside sources that jostle the status quo within education either intentionally or by accident.

Here are a few sites I recommend to get you out of your edublogging echo chamber:

1. One of my favorites is Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf’s The Quantified Self. Any look at recent posts will inspire you to think about your own discipline.

* For example, why can’t classes be more like Meet-Ups? Some of my most successful classes were ones where we met socially for breakfast or coffee/tea. Why not have a Meet-Up Monday?
* What about observing our disciplines and student use of tools within the discipline? A recent post about Bill Jarrold describes how he uses the command line to log productivity. Why not use Twitter and Twitter hashtags to “log” writing productivity of all sorts that your students produce? I teach composition and have wondered about my students’ writing lives. This would be a good way to open up a can of observation on ‘em.
* What about foursquare to extend the boundaries of your classroom? I have been wondering about how to bring games into the classroom and this might be it. What are the affordances of foursquare in the classroom? This post suggests a data visualization for it and some more ideas. Yes, I think this will do.

2. Another one is ze frank’s page:

* I love how the effectiveness of the blog-comment template is shown so well here. It is a pattern that any writer can use to attract an audience. Besides it demonstrates one of ze frank’s principles so well–surprise is everywhere.

3. Or Dave Snowden’s excellent and evocative Cognitive Edge. While technically inside of the envelope of learning and education he also writes about leadership and family.

* Snowden’s software, SenseMaker Suite, might be applicable to my burgeoning dissertation interest in social capital in professional learning communities.
* Or perhaps you discover a quote that thoroughly bumfuzzles your mind like this one: “In general, if a community is not physically, temporally and spiritually rooted, then it is alienated from its environment and will focus on survival rather than creativity and collaboration.” This may seem obvious to many, but to me it points to the sterility of classrooms in general and to mine in paricular. One of the oddest feelings I have gotten since I moved from teaching high school to university has been a ‘coldness’. I miss the heat of high school and I think this quote explains this in part and points me toward a major goal for fall classes–figure out ways to root my classes. And I also think about how to ‘root’ my online classes as well.

4. How about Scott McCloud’s Mind Dump where I discovered:

* Eric Mazur’s physics class where he makes the awesomely sensible and arguable assertion that you can forget facts but you can’t forget understanding. This guy is my new hero and I am determined to apply some of his techniques for physics to my lit and comp classes.
* Or perhaps I will be moved to print up this quote from Seth Godin that McCloud points to for our consideration: “The internet has dramatically widened the number of available substitutes. You don’t have to like it, but it’s true. That means you have to work far harder to create work that can’t easily be replaced.” How can I make myself less replaceable? That is an essential question for every world class employee who wants real job security.

How about the blog Sports Are 80% Mental ?

* File this under the category “Everything You Know Is Wrong”: “Physical activity had no impact on weight change, but weight clearly led to less activity.” In other words don’t be hatin’ on the fat man or boy or woman or girl. My second thought when I read this was whether there are similar ‘Truths’ in my discipline that need puncturing. What are the assumptions that guide my work that might be wrong? I will be on my guard for this during the upcoming school year and will report back.

The idea that innovation comes from the margins seems right biologically– growth occurs along the edge (wherever that might be). So my challenge to you is to bring back similar (and better) missives from the fraxillated margins.  Just fold one interest right on top of another and that’s where you might want to be.

tellio :: Aug.05.2010 :: Metaphor, Poetry, Story, Wikipedia, coming to terms, philosophy :: No Comments »

The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s – NYTimes.com

kdwashburn

Tech & mini-generation gaps. Wow! If true, how do we keep teachers up-to-date?!?

amyrrutherford

we’re old fogies, apparently

SergeGuillermeP

More on our kids / Generation Y from the NY Times : “The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s”

DctrLoLo

Just when I thought there was a chance I might catch up to tech.

selfhiker

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology”

sloanr

Tech creates larger generation gaps now?

gary_kern

the generation gap accelerated

juliawakefield

Interesting NY Times article: evolving technology is shaping the next few generations & creating generation gaps.

rachelcondensed

Technology causes gaps within generations? The NYT thinks so http://bit.ly/4vcCO7 (and I agree http://bit.ly/8UAtgM)

georgekroner

Children of Cyberspace “They’ll want their teachers & professors to respond …immediately”

I used Kutano to gather comments on the NYT article above.  Main responses?  Fear, danger, despair (mild), problems.  Why are there no opportunities perceived?  Are there any opportunities to be gathered from this field of change.  What does it mean for me as a teacher who has to stay abreast of the tools so that I can keep pace with my students.  Or should I just be who I am, do my best, and hope for the best?  Or might I just admit to my students that I am a student, too, and always will be and that we are in this together.  Let’s learn together, shall we, and draw legitimacy in a shared way.

tellio :: Jan.18.2010 :: TechKnowledgE, coming to terms, life, philosophy, whats next :: No Comments »

Johnson in his book the history of air–design of factories–follow the power.  Ie the steam plants needed central power corridors to reach all plant floors.  This dictated construction.

Is this analogous to education today where the central power is the Internet?  What educational “construction” must follow for the central power to reach the factory floor.

tellio :: Jan.02.2010 :: Educational Common Life, philosophy :: No Comments »