Wanted: Firsthand Knowledge

 I have a bit of a bad conscious this morning. One of the teachers I worked with over the last years asked me to become a part of a parent, teacher, and student work group. The topic of the group is “use of private media in the school”. Initially, I said yes to participate in the group. Now I’ve decided not to get involved.

It is not because the topic isn’t worthy of thoughtful consideration. It is not that it isn’t one dear to my heart. Also there is an immediate need to figure out how to deal with earnest infringements of current policies. My reticence has to do with the dynamics of the situation in general.

There has been a boycott in using mobile phones during school hours for a few years now. The students are allowed to use other forms of media (e.g. iPods). Now with the occurrence of smart phones there is no distinction between mobile phones and other media. The teachers want further restrictions into media use. The students want leniency. 

It is an age-old challenge. How can a younger generation be heard?  So, on the surface of the matter, it would seem all we need is constructive debate, collective aims, and mutual respect for the different parties’ positions.

If I have learned anything in the last ten years of working with new media (can we still call it new media if it is twenty years old?), talk will resolve little. The students will resist being shoved into one box. The adults will site actual misconduct to promote the necessity for more restrictions. Everyone is avoiding the one elephant in the porcelain shop. That is, how to find an acceptable solution when those in a position of authority, teachers and parents, know next to nothing firsthand about what they are talking about.

It is as if Mennonite teachers and parents were asked to be leaders in teaching their students and children about modern farming practices.

It just will not happen. It is not that their skills and experiences in teaching that are obsolete. Nor is it that traditional education is wrong. Admittedly, there are many uncertainties in adopting modern methods and technologies. I am not disputing any of these things.

My only dispute is that I think the misuse of media by children and teens on the school grounds or in their homes is, in part, a result of our inability to act upon our responsibility to lead them in it proper use in classroom learning and social situations. If parents and teachers don’t know through their own personal experiences how media is best practiced, then it is questionable whether they are in a position to qualitatively offer assistance in restricting its misuse.

Maybe the things we value can not me captured

Watch it on Academic Earth

You have got to love the internet... for all of you who want to learn and explore within the walls of (an elite) educational system... go wild.

Being an Adventurer

Alastair Humphreys is an adventurer. He is asking school teachers around the world to use his book "The Boy who Biked the World" in school curriculum. 

The book is a children's book (but probably grade 8-9 level of English if English is your second language) and tells the story of his travels of bicycling the world. He would like to instill a curiosity for adventure in young people. This week he wrote this post:

"I am really pleased with The Boy Who Biked The World, my first book for children. My aim was to wrap education, the inspiration to think big and a curiosity about travel and the world into a fun, adventurous story. (You can read a sample couple of chapters here to judge whether I succeeded).

I’m now looking for primary school teachers anywhere in the world who might be interested in using the Boy Who Biked The World series as a class reading book. In addition to being an enjoyable book it is an ideal entry into many other classroom topics. I can provide bulk copies of the book at a discount price. And as well as personally signing each book I will also be happy to chat to classes worldwide via Skype, or answer questions through email.

If you are a teacher, or know any teachers please would you take a quick look at these sample chapters and then get in touch to discuss ideas. Thank you!"

Though this book obviously would be of interest to both boys and girls, I think it would be os special interest to boys. If you are a parent or teacher of teenage boys and want to concentrate positively on letting boys be boys... What better way could there be than getting their classmates to read the book and talk personally to Alistar over skype?

The other brilliant idea Alistar had this year was to spend his year in England going on mirco-adventures. This is a notion that everyone, but particularly young people should consider participating in. It can give an electrifying jumpstart to our inner lethargy or complacency and sets us off on a journey of discovery right outside our back doors. 

He and Ben Saunders are going to attempt an new adventure this year: 

SOUTH is the first return journey to the South Pole on foot, and the longest unsupported (human-powered) polar journey in history. The 1800 mile journey will take 4 months to complete, hauling 200kg sleds.

They will be sending photos and blog post daily. Following their progress would be a good geography/history project, don't you think?

.

Motivational Speaker: Explorer and Adventurer from Alastair Humphreys on Vimeo

I have followed Alistar's adventures and blogs for years now and know him to be a very enthusiastic, articulate, educated leader. Any contact with him would undoubtedly impress, if not inspire your children or students.

Who says statistics can't be fun?

Oh heavens, this site is so much fun! For all of you, young and old, this is one smart software tool to experiment with. For you who are parents or educators, there are a lot of stories you and your children can come up with using the information here.

Social media as it's best

Once again the Guardian has made a master stroke in setting standards of how social media can mix with news media and the publishing industry to come up with something brilliant. A few weeks ago, they launched a Children's Book platform.

If you are a child (16 and under), a parent, teacher, favourite aunt, dotting grandparent, or just someone who wants to help children to learn the joys of reading... do go to the site and spend some time there.

Can you imagine anything more rewarding than helping a child discover the wonders of books?

I heart TEDxNYED

Ok, I know, I know, not more TED, but heck, yes to more TED. Just spent the day watching the TEDxNYED videos. My mind is sizzling. My butt is numb.

I won’t bore all of you who are not educators or parents of children in schools, by embedding all of my favourites. Rather, I just want to make a list of links to a few of them and explain why they are worth watching.

Dan Meyer’s presentation introduction is a grabber:

“Can I ask you to please recall a time when you really loved something: a movie, album, a song or a book. And, you recommended it wholeheartedly to someone you also really liked. And, you anticipated that reaction, you waited for it, and it came back, and the person hated it. So by way of introduction, that is the exact same state that I spend every working day of the last six years… I teach high school math.”

He then goes on and explains with passion and precision five factors that contribute to this situation of having to teach math to unmotivated students, as well as five factors that can change this.

Dan Cohen’s presentation is titled, “The Last Digit of Pi”, and is an entertaining, but probing story about pi, which is “a story about the psychology of change and the inertia of the past systems of knowledge, and past systems of education”.

Mark Welsh is always an interesting person to listen to. In this talk he is no less so. He tells a very funny story at the beginning that explains the tortures and joys of culture shock, but also discovery of and participation in these new cultures. “This is actually why anthropologists do what they do. We want to become children again and learn a new world in a new way with open eyes.” How marvellous is this description of the journey all of us should venture on, anthropologist or not. Yet, in the end, his talk is not one of inspiration, but of caution (sometimes when we try to use media (for social changes), media uses us) and we would do well to listen.

Jay Rosen’s presentation is called, “Pragmatism: Look for really good problems…”. Watch it. Enjoy.

Media Production in the Warmth and Comfort of Home

(making of film of a Belgium natural gas advert, the advert is shown at the end of the film)

Stop-motion animation is one of my favourite forms of filmmaking. When I was working in schools, it was the sort of project that children “get” right away. It doesn’t matter whether they are grade 2 students or grade 13 students, you explain the basics and off they go. What is so transparently unique about stop-motion is how a simple idea (e.g. warmth means wool) can be translated into a charming story.

Many children tell extremely complex stories that are often unintelligible to their listeners or readers if they are given free reign of their imagination. Stop-motion storytelling is most effective way of slicing the storyline down.



Take a look at the video above if you want to see how making a very simple stop-motion film allowed this young fellow, Pep, start creating media rather than just consuming it. This is the sort of media production educators (principals, teachers, and parents alike) should be encouraging their students to do.

For a detailed and interesting analysis of what Pep is saying in the film, please go to this post of Henry Jenkin’s Confessions of an Aca-Fan blog.

I’ve published numerous stop-motion animations in the past, so I won’t bore you with any more. If you want to know more about how to make your own stop-motion, please go to this post at makeuseof.com.

P(T)eaching to the Choir

Another good video trying to convince all educators and those of us involved in some manner with the education system the necessity to implement new technology-supported learning methods...

Best qoute, "This isn't the Information Age, it is the Learning Age. The quicker people get their heads around that, the better."

Technology helps people think in a different way

I always was sceptical of the "no child left behind" program and its focus on standardised learning. I wonder whether it wouldn't be more appropriate to start a "no teacher left behind" program that focuses less on information transfer and more on differentiating collaborative explorative learning methods. Or, just assure that teachers know about the "practice what you preach" policy of pedagogy.

My children have come home from school over the last while with numerous horror stories. Stories about the antiquity of their teachers’ teaching methods and their bomb resistant mental attitudes when it comes to technology.

This video shows that all they really have to do is stop talking and start listening.

Need Your Opinion

Once again, I need your help. I made up this presentation today and I need your suggestions and opinions on it. A colleague and I are holding a workshop on Thursday for a group of teachers about Web 2.0 presentation tools. I happen to know that many of you are teachers, were teachers, or we involved in education... so, please give it a look.

Creating Presentation

View more presentations from lilalia.

We are going to keep the theoretical part down to a minimum (30 minutes) because we do not have much time (4 hours). Ideally, I'd like for the participants to work for 3 of the 4 hours, and for the instructors to present for 30 minutes, and leave 30 minutes for feedback.

Learning to Change - Changing to Learn

I'm working on setting up a series of workshops for teachers and creating a teachers' network. While preparing a presentation for one of the first seminars, I came upon this video again in my bookmarker list.

I'm sure I published it here before, but for those of you who haven't watched it, please take a look. In the last ten years I've been involved professionally with various aspects of learning: e-learning, K-12 media literacy, developing software systems for classroom and out of classroom learning. So much of what these people say in the video resonants with me: professionally, as a parent, and personally.

Imagine having someone with these visions and convictions as a boss or colleague. Bliss.

Head up And Eyes Forward

The other day, I received a comment from a high school teacher who said: she didn’t like digital technology in classrooms and the internet is a pain. She did give reasons for this attitude (e.g. frequent breakdowns of her whiteboard and strict internet censorship in her school), but her comment still saddened me.

Not because she has obviously not “got” how useful digital technology is as a motivator and communicator for young people’s learning. Not because she does not realise that part of her responsibility as a teacher is to prepare her students for their future and media literacy is part of that future. What saddened me was the fact that I hear this comment over and over again from teachers, and often from very dedicated, intelligent, and engaged teachers. The only problem is, when it comes to media literacy, they are engaged in teaching methodologies of the last century.

Well, not to be discouraged. Head up. Eyes forward…

Progressive Education circa 1940

Even though my children were born in the 20th century, they have few or no memories from that century. That is, other than that what they experience in their day-to-day learning at school. This video, from the 1940s, is an idealistic representation of the teaching methods my children experience in their high school today.



Idealistic, because even though the ministry of education encourages the practices shown in the video, in reality my children sit in rows and the teachers use frontal instructional form 90% of the time. They are also learning 80% of their learning material by rote; so let’s throw in some 1920s teaching methods in there. My children are being taught 1920s to 1940s educational methods by teachers raised, in the most part, in the 1960s, and this is suppose to help them prepare for working in the 2020s. Is it any wonder my son believes school is a place to pay penance for having been born in the wrong century, and life outside and online is where you really learn through communication, connectivity, and collaboration.

Postcards from Past Lives: Grade 7

Dear Lilalia,

Ugh! Seventh grade! Can there be anything worse than being in Mr. Tournier’s 7th grade class? Mr. Beer Breath Tournier. The class where all the delinquents (children with behavioural problems) or “retards” (children with learning disabilities) are in.

The school thinks you cannot read or write, just because you cannot read out loud with fluidity or spell correctly. It is strange that they think this, since you spend all of your free time reading. You are a member three libraries, for Pete’s sake.

Don’t despair. You are not a “retard”. You just are dyslexic. They don’t know about dyslexia in your school yet.

It will take another ten years before another teacher tells you about your dyslexia. So, scrape through high school. Go off to dance. Wait a few years before you return to your studies.

Just so you know, better days are ahead.

Love,

the older lilalia

Postcards from Past Lives: Dean of Admissions

Dear Dean of Admissions,

I did wonder during those first few semesters why you, the dean of admissions, accepted me into your university electrical engineering program. What made you blindly overlooked my lack of academic qualifications? Perhaps you thought I was old enough to qualify for a mature student status. What made you believe me capable of learning theories of quantum physics and thermodynamics?

This remained a mystery until years later, when I met you at a party of a gay friend of mine. You introduced yourself and confessed the fact that you accepted me into the program solely because I had been the first ballet dancer who had ever applied to your program. The ballet buff and the closet queen in you, jetéd over the hurdle of professional propriety and let me into the program.

To this day, I don’t quite know whether that was such a wise decision you made. I never did fit in to the baseball cap-toting, beer-guzzling mob of that time, but I did, strangely enough, find my place.

I learnt a lot in those years and for this I am eternally grateful to you. Maybe you did propel me into strange world of engineering on a whim, but it also profoundly widened my horizon.

in deep gratitude,

the ex-ballet dancer

Creating a Dialog

This slide show is a part of a presentation I gave to a group of teachers and professional women last winter in preparation for activities related to our national Girl's Day program. The program is organised on various fronts, but it is the work between the schools and the business community that is most crucial to getting the program up and running.

Girl\'s Day 2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: mentoring education)

A teacher approached me a few months before Girl's Day 2008 was to run, with a dilemma. Apparently, the girls from her school (grade 7-8) had not left a very good impression with the professional women they had visited the year before. The women stated that the girls came to their companies appeared overall to be disinterested and distant. They wondered whether the only reason the girls agreed to come to their workplaces was to get a day off school. The girls had not asked any questions or expressed any interest in what they had heard during the professional women's presentations. When asked, many of the girls admitted that they found the presentations boring and they didn't know what questions to ask in the Q&A sessions, so they didn't say anything.

The teacher came to me to ask how the project could be made more interesting using digital media. And, as happens so often, the solution did not lie in introducing all sorts of new media into the activities, but by changing the learning format to one which would encouraged collaborative learning.

The previous Girl's Day activities were so structured that the girls were sent off to various companies without previous knowledge of the companies or the professional women. The professional women introduced themselves, gave a presentation of their company and their particular job positions, carried through a Q&A session and then sent the girls on home.

This year's Girl's Day was structured so:

• Professional women introduced themselves and their professional field in short biographies and sent them to the school two weeks before the event.
• The girls divided up into small groups and chose which professional women they would visit and sent the women emails with their names and questions they wished to ask them during Girl's Day.
• The professional women had time to think of how they would respond to the questions and also created a list of their own questions that they could ask the girls when they came to visit.
• The different groups went to the different companies and interviewed the professional women they were allocated.
• The girls returned to school and each group made up a presentation that was a story about the professional women they visited and the profession these women worked in.
• Each group presented their presentation to the other girls, teachers and the professional women at an evening event.

Even though the girls did use media (cell phones, digital cameras, mp3 players (recorders), cc photo material from the Internet, and Open Office presentation program), and the use of media did motivate them to be more alert, this only played a peripheral role. It was the fact that everyone prepared themselves for the day and the fact that professional women created a dialog with the girls and not lectures that made the exchange so successful.

Book and Film Recommendations

I am in need of some book and film recommendations for a school project I’m involved in. The project is an ESL project with three themes: London, India, and immigration. If possible, could you please suggest any reading and viewing material that concerns any of these three or includes all three of them?

Preaching to the Choir

Have you ever been invited to give a course or a presentation to a group of reluctant or resistant converts? It takes a certain type of person to survive such an experience. For the first twenty years or so of my professional career, I usually only preached to the choir when giving presentations or submitting project proposals. In the last years, since I started working in schools, I’m standing amongst the reluctant and resistant.

Originally, I was involved, one-way or another, in training technicians to maintain or repair complex medical equipment. The technicians wanted to do their job well, for not infrequently, lives depended on them. I wanted them to do their job well too, for exactly the same reason. Even the shareholder-pleasing corporate executives running the company were interested in us doing our jobs well. Then I went over to working in university research.

The projects I worked and work on are highly innovative. Or, innovative in the sense that the ideas we are trying to promote (i.e., creative and constructive use of digital media in schools (K-12 grades)), are not commonly practiced in the schools in our region. Even though many studies, in the last then years, state the importance of media literacy in our children’s development, the school system here ignores their responsibility to lead and guide their students in this learning process. The last three weeks have been particularly discouraging for me because nearly every meeting I have attended with teachers has been like swimming through toffee.

I am discourage not only because the teachers are so reluctant or resistant when it comes to introducing media in there classroom learning scenarios (e.g. grade 9 math teacher reluctant for her students to use Excel tables to record data), but also because I cannot convince them to change their Old World practices.

It does not help to point to the conclusive results of the studies, or to indulge in passionate rants. Before the teachers actually take the leap and use media in their classrooms with all the joys and sorrow this brings, no amount of talking will change things for the present generation of students.

Just in the last weeks I have heard the following statements,

“My students know if they want to reach me, they have to come and find me, for I don’t look at my email inbox for weeks on end.”

(from a dear friend and dedicated college English literature teacher)

“I have to study for exams, I don’t have time to waste on the Internet. Maybe in three or four years time, I’ll look and see what is offered there that I can’t find in books.”

(from a college occupational therapy student nearing graduation and who, like her other classmates was very resistant to use a computer as a learning tool)

“What is the pedagogical advantage of using media? It only causes confusion and trouble in the classroom.”

(from a high school math teacher)

“The teachers don’t want us to use digital media. They don’t even want to use it themselves. Why do you bother trying to convince them otherwise? You’ll only fall on your face if you keep trying to present them (the teachers) with new ideas.”

(from my 18 year old son)

I really question the soundness of my ambition to become a teacher in my next career. How can one person make any difference when the learning instructional forms are so rigidly planted in the past century? With this frame of mind, I listen to Geetha Narayanan keynote talk at ED-Media 08. She talks about the necessity for remodelling our educational system,

“It is my current position that contemporary forms of schooling do not sit comfortably with the potential of new media. Nor do they resonate with the needs of youth today. All of who need to live, and live well, and not just struggle to survive in today’s complex world.”

I sit in my living room and I am transported over to her inner city programs in India. I am a choir member listening and rejoicing to the sound of her preaching voice as she talks about her children and teachers and the wonder of learning. Maybe I will become a teacher, maybe not, but it is inspiring to know there are people out there not only with a vision of reform, but with the energy and influence to implement it.

Social Day 2008

The children did not go to school today because they participated in a national “Social Day”. This is a day when hundreds of thousand school children spend their school day working in private homes, in offices, government or educational institutions. Their earnings go towards helping build schools, support youth projects, or run anti-racist projects in the Balkan States. This organization organises both the Social Day and the work in the Balkan States, and it is run by high school students.

Link: sevenload.com

Video titled “Heroes, please volunteer!”
The organisation is called Schüler helfen Leben (literal translation, students helping life) and they are expecting upwards of two million Euros in earnings from this year’s Social Day alone. As you can see from the video, whose goal is to get students sign up to do this voluntary work, the message is very clearly designed to appeal to its target audience. It doesn’t matter if the students help their grandmother in the garden, wash windows in a grade school, or work in a company on this day, collectively the children’s efforts create stellular results and each is a hero in their own right.

Internet Safety VII

(this is the last post of this series)

A few months ago, I was asked to give an ESL terminology course at a school for occupational therapy (OT). I didn’t really know anything substantial about occupational therapy, but I did know something about scientific terminology, I speak English, and I knew some excellent Internet language tools and Web 2.0 applications. What I lacked in knowledge, I hoped to compensate in methodology.

Since the students were nearing the end of their program, they all had extensive knowledge of OT practices. Ironically, it turns out that the students (20-30 years younger than I am) didn’t know anything substantial about Web 2.0 applications (e.g., 80% of the students didn’t know what a blog was, only one person had read a blog). Which was a shame, because I hoped to get them to use these tools to build a bridge to the large English-speaking OT community out there.

It took me a few weeks to figure out how to make the students feel comfortable enough with the media to work well together. It also took me a few weeks for me to take myself out of my comfort zone (i.e., a media saturated world) and meet the students half way with some photocopied lessons and magic markers in hand. There is only a few more weeks left to the course and it has been a great learning experience for me.

It struck me recently that this situation of students being media shy is a reversal of the situation most teachers are faced with these days. It is probably far more typical for students to want to use media in classroom learning and the teachers are the ones who feel overwhelmed by these expectations.

Yet, essentially, the learning process remains the same. We, as parents and educators, must create a learning situation where our children feel comfortable and encouraged to learn. Often, this is at the cost of removing ourselves from our own comfort zone since we must respond appropriately to what it is our children need.

I remember being fascinated by the concept that present-day teachers no longer have to just teach, they have to learn. One of the shortcomings of our educational system is the focus on teaching our teachers how to teach, instead of teaching our teachers how to learn. Our teachers must guide our children as they partake on a journey of learning experiences, rather than just focus on preparing them to preform in standardized tests.

The reason this is so, is because our children already have access to of a wealth of information. I am not just talking about facts they learn in their school curriculum, but also through books in libraries, shows on television, sites on the Internet, computer games, etc. They know so much stuff, but it is only through experiencing learning in context to their world, that this information can become knowledge. If personal contextualized experiences are missing, then information will not become long-term learning.

The most effective way of helping our children in their learning experiences is not to tell them what to do, but to share with them our own learning experiences. If you are a parent and you want to help your children, then start using the tools they are using already or will be using soon. Use the tools meaningfully and appropriately to communicate, present, document what you know in life.