Not so Distant Future. . .the micro version

Keynote--Arts, Brain research & Creativity

The stage is set for creativity this morning at the opening session.  As we walked in to the auditorium, a dramatic abstract video is playing on the screen, the room is darkened except for some blue lighting, and a dramatic cellist(Zoe Keeling?) is playing.   It feels like something out of Cirque de Soleil.

I’ve live blogged this session, but it can’t really convey the energy and interesting mix of ideas creating by these five speakers.

Today’s opening session features a panel led by Andrew Zolli:

Elizabeth Streb

Michael McCauley

Mary Cullinane

Dr. Francesc Pedro

Michael McCauley—“Seek out your cathedrals.”  Always seek a higher purpose because it elevates your thinking.

Mary Cullinane—School of the Future.  Agree to not know;  Create a school where failure is an option—where educators and students can fail.  There is so much pressure on schools right now that this is difficult.   We need some ad hoc gathering spaces—to allow kids to gather together.  And it seems like most schools don’t want students to “gather.”

Elizabeth Streb—a teacher told her to pay attention to what you are interested in.   She was interested in movement.  She was interested in flight and how long could people fly?

She invented  a place in New York City called Slam—and created a lot of spaces at Slam where you can experiment, move, fly and get your body in the air.

   “We find our place in the jumping joyous jumble of life”

How do they create this?  They try to break the rule.  Ask questions.  Set impossible goals. 

She’s showing a video of her dancers choreographing a routine with giant cement blocks flying across the stage while the dancers leap between them.

She showed a video of Ricochet, where her dancers run up against a plexiglass wall and fall. 

Notion of how we can “agree to not know” as Mary said—to go in ignoring what you know when you face a challenge or a question, in order to event something new.

The garage as a metaphor for the creative process.

www.strebusa.org

Michael—Creativity can be a dirty business.  You have to break things and fall down.  Mix things up, mix people together, bring people together—if the “flow” is going, it doesn’t matter who the people are, you just go with it.

Frances—Research on different sectors in terms of innovation.  Theory of the Four pumps? (I’m not sure I understood this correctly)  Four factors in education for innovation—   1.  Ability to include dooers and users(learners). 2.  Our ability to network.   3.  Ability to to work as part of a system but act autonomously and scale things up when needed.                   4.  Technology.    Teachers consider themselves as artisans, but what place do we assign research?

Zolli is asking about risk and empowerment and courage. 

Mary is talking about the idea of risk in education.   Can you imagine if innovation meant swimming downstream?  In schools, innovative thinking is swimming upstream, and you get very very tired.   So at School of Future, they’ve tried to eliminate some bureacratic requirements.  Live within constraints but pushing the edge was their approach.

Michael—Big corporations are very thirsty for innovation.  If schools would adopt that mindset, how different things would be.

He works in face to face marketing, trying to get companies closer to the consumer. Target asked his company to create a campaign for marathoners to use their pharmacy.  Gave example creating a tunnel filled with motivating music for marathoners’ last stretch to help them get through that last bit of the run.  It was a promotion but the agency wasn’t prepared for the paraplegics who went through the tunnel and how moving it was.   He believes that he isn’t just doing a promotion—but something to create an indelible moment.  His belief and enthusiasm is admirable—wouldn’t it be great to see educators espousing that they are creating indelible moments for students.

Frances—Foreign language education —research shows that it should start earlier, very early.   Idea of gender based education—research doesn’t support it thus far.

Zolli was talking about a study about language and infants and the range of sounds they could hear, which supports the idea that early language acquisition is critical—because the younger you are, the more receptive you are to these “sound ” differences in language.

Mary—  spent time at Microsoft.  She came from education to Microsoft.  The norm of the environment was constantly questioning “how can I get better?”     At Microsoft, she had time to think.    She wishes we had that kind of environment at schools.   Employees were encouraged to think.  They had gathering spaces to share.   No need to justify what you were doing.  Doing and thinking were the same thing.   (LOL..but they weren’t open source offices—-tech joke).    Everyone has their own office that look the same, no matter their level.

Books or things the speakers would recommend:

Michael—recommended Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, and Dream Society

Frances recommended their website which will have new brain research posted next week

Elizabeth—www.strebusa.org and invites everyone to come to Slam in New York City—it’s always open.   Teachers are on my shoulder this entire life that I am living.  A teacher suggested to her to always go into a bookstore and read the name of every title in one section.  Then pick one.   Very stimulating idea.

Mary—Remember one word.  Motive.   Create an environment where you constantly ask—what motivates our kids?  What are the obstacles?  What do they value?  What is their environment?   We need to have that conversation.

Andrew Zolli—Ask a Ninja.com.  Your students are watching this and it shows what can be done with a laptop and some video.

This session was an excellent example of how to bring innovation into a school by mixing and matching people from different walks of life, different fields and different interests as a way to generate conversations. 

I think it might be interesting for the power lunches we are starting on my campus next year to do some that are a mix of two or three speakers.  You have to pick the people that have that enthusiasm and inspiration, who really love what they do, whatever that is.

And Andrew Zolli’s moderation of the session helped set the tone as well of energy, creativity and humor.

I applaud NECC for setting the tone of the session right from the beginning, as well.

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Coherence

I really enjoyed Doug Johnson’s session today and it was unfortunate my battery died during it.   He was engaging, funny, had great slides and very good insights.  It was very fun meeting him after reading his blog, as well.

NECC recorded a podcast of his presentation, which I’d recommend once it’s up.

There’s so much to process here and so much going on and so many people.   I feel like one of the fish at the aquarium last night—we were watching a huge tank of fish, and I wondered how it felt never to be alone—so many of the fish were in schools surrounded by other fish all the time.

Do we allow students any time during the day to process things?  And should conferences plan a little “down” time where you can just sit and process ideas?

Although NECC has done a great job of creating all these different spaces—like the bloggers cafe, the global cafe—different areas in the building where you can sit with a few other people and chat or just work on your own.

And I know with this many sessions and this many people, that you feel somewhat driven to get as much out of it as you can.  But it does make me ponder what the day is like for students sometimes, gathering up so many ideas in one day.

Had some interesting conversation at lunch with Chris Lehmann about coherence in schools and curriculum.  The Science Leadership Academy uses essential questions to help tie the curriculum together and give it coherence, which I think is an excellent support to a coherent educational experience for students.

I’m feeling a lack of coherence myself, partly because my own sort of network is a little bit disrupted—I’m used to having my real blog, where I can have commenters, see who is visiting, and just where I’m used to writing.  So it feels kind of disruptive to be writing somewhere else, and not able to interact very much with anyone.  I’m missing the interaction part.

I’m starting to get very frustrated about edublogs not functioning properly. 

Anyway, it gives me empathy for students when we disrupt their day with different schedules, changes in routines, etc.  (Trying to look on the bright side!)

Time to get some sleep—Tomorrow is busy.  I hope I can create some time somewhere tomorrow to sit on the bottom of the aquarium and lurk a little, so to speak—to watch the other fish, and get my bearings.

Classrooms and Libraries with Doug Johnson

I’m so glad to be sitting in this session with Doug Johnson at this time of the afternoon, because he is making us laugh, and after lunch and a day full of workshops that is important.

He’s starting off by sharing with us some ways life is different for our students.

Beloit College

www.beloit.edu/~pubaff/mindset

List of how our students’ experience is different than ours.

2 big understandings—

—It will be easier to change the way we teach, rather than the way our students learn.  We can’t change a whole demographic group.

-Today’s students like to learn.  They just don’t like what we want to teach and how we teach it.

He is comparing his two children—one who loved every subject, and one who just didn’t like school, other than art, business ed, computers….

What do the studies show about the demographics of the students we are teaching?   Some recommended reading:

—Educause—Educating the Net Generation (meta-analysis of all studies on this)  free download

—Pew Internet and the American Life Project

battery is going…..more later.

Preparing students for 21st century workforce

I’m sitting in on a panel on Preparing students for the workforce.  Although I feel that schools need to do many things besides preparing students for the workplace, I am interested in hearing this panel’s views on what qualities they think are important and how that meshes with what our campus has been discussing regarding 21st century skills that our students need in the web 2.0 world.

I’m liveblogging this, so excuse the raw writing!

The panel includes corporate and education leaders:

Fari Ebrahimi from Verizon

Dr. Barbara Kurshan from Curriki

Dr. Steven Paine from West Virginia Dept. of Education and

Jim Rubillo from National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Fari is talking about as a parent, that he realized his child was using web 2.0 tools to communicate.  And then he also realized at a block party in his neighborhood, none of the high school graduates were talking about majoring in technology.   So he realized his role for sharing the technology’s benefits with his own child, and sharing information about technology literacy for his own child.  

He’s also paying attention to the company’s student interns, because they are online collaborating and he realizes he can learn from them.

I admire his attitude about learning—that anyone can be his teacher.

He’s considering starting social networks within the Verizon environment to partner more and provide tools for their employees to network with one another.   So he sees this as a group effort between parents, teachers, and the corporate world.

The first question is how is technology changing education?

Dr. Paine is sharing a story about his daughter who got home late and proceeded to get online.  He thought she wasn’t doing her homework, but she showed him that she was using instant messaging to solve chemistry problems online.

He commented, “If we ever are going to compete for the interest of our kids….we must prepare our teachers to teach the way that our kids are living.” 

“If we can secure all of the components of that technology world in a school setting…technology is that great equalizer…but more importantly, it is the great equalizer in helping students be globally competitive.”

Dr. Rubillo says there is a gap, because to “screen-agers’, i.e., teenagers, it is not technology because it’s natural to them, a natural part of their lives.

Dr. Kurshan says technology is a catlyst to change, and we need teachers to change education and they need the tools to do that.  She’s differentiating between linear knowledge space that we grew up with— (you start on page 1 , end on page 60, you’re done).  Our kids have grown up in a random knowledge space.  So we have to teach in a random knowledge space and provide students the option to have choices in a random knowledge space.

That is a fascinating distinction, and I want to follow up on that later.

Ebrahimi points out that technology is not only changing education, it’s changing everything.   He thinks the concept of speed has become very important.  He gives an example of when he was talking with a student and offered to email him information.  The student thought that was too slow, and why didn’t he just get on Facebook, and then share it with everybody.

To be competitive in the workforce, or just part of the broader social network, our students need to be able to learn to adapt to this speed.  He asks, How do you continue to educate yourself?   Technology is breaking down the time continuum.

What are we doing to change things so students will study engineering?

Dr. Rubillo—thinks it is what a society values.  We are competing with many nations that value math and science.  He’s not sure we value math and science in front of our students.  

Dr. Kurshan thinks we need to look at how we teach science and math and make it more relevant—more application based—more random knowledge based.   Students go back and learn it to get the answer when they are working on a practical problem.

Fari Ebrahimi says “We need rock stars.”  People have to feel it’s cool to be an educator, we have to balance the pay scales so that educators can make a decent living.   If a student could be famous within their own school because of their math/science skills then you have examples for the other students.

Three years ago, one of the students that received a Verizon scholarship told the committee that his brother was murdered in front of him.  in east L.A.   The student said that he wanted to become a doctor, because  had he been a doctor he could have helped his brother.

Ebrahimi points out that when we talk about setting examples, we have to show kids one of their own who chose a different path, who is a rock star for the other kids.

Dr. Paine mentions a story about President Hu in China—who announced to his cabinet that he wanted China to be the world’s greatest most innovative economy by 2016, and we’re going to do that by investing in education first.  He brings up the example of the Sputnik era and it’s impact on our education programs in schools.  

He emphasized emphatically that more standardized tests are not the answer, that we need more performance based tests and other efforts.

Dr. Kurshan concurred.  She was in India recently, and was listening to a study that is coming out of India, about the emphasis on testing there at elite schools—which discovered that students couldn’t problem solve effectively even if they were passing the standardized tests.  She encourages investing in innovative solutions.

Dr. Paine points out that it’s not only about increasing rigor.  It’s about teaching students to be problem solvers, creative thinkers, how to be responsible—those sorts of 21st century skills.

It’ll take me a bit to process the ideas here.  More later….

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Collaborative global projects

I’m just joining Nigel Quirke-Bolt’s and Nigel Metcalfe’s session on collaborative projects and Nigel is starting out with a photo of Nigel’s Place pub.  Always a good way to start a workshop ;)

They both work in the National University of Ireland in the department of education and their project is linked here http://dissolvingboundaries.org. 

Dissolving Boundaries is part of an attempt to reduce conflicts between the two parts of Ireland.   They also started a Local Traditions and Ceremonies project with Asia-Europe classroom participants with 11 different countries from Singapore to Denmark to Ireland and more.

The site is run on Moodle, at http://local-traditions.org with a private login for students, and the purpose was to allow students between 12-18 years of age to discover their own local traditions and ceremonies as well as those of others.  Students could upload documents, interact, use forums or blogs—all via Moodle and in a protected environment.

Students needed little training on using the tools, though they had students that came from very rural environments in a couple of countries and hadn’t utilized the internet before.

Phase 1: Students got to know each other through forums to build relationships in the virtual environment.

Phase 2: Students getting to know each other’s ways.  Students posted customs which generated a lot of questions from other partipants;  some of the customs included mock crucifixions, flooding the villages, etc.   So the Irish students were challenged to think of their own traditions that were of interest.

Phase 3:  Sharing what has been learned.  The information which all the students had learned was then moved from Moodle and portrayed in a more public way on a website.

Teachers that were interviewed about the project commented on the many skills like communication, research, understanding and empathy which were developed, which reminds me of the things Will Richardson said in the previous session about blogging.

Nigel pointed out it was a significant shift and giving up of control for the teaches involved, but the teachers found that the student motivation was very strong.   Students were learning technology skills but using them for a purpose. 

The second project was the Dissolving Boundaries project, which focuses on collaboration between students.   This project had a real world importance, in trying to reduce conflict between the north and the south.  One problem was that in the Republic of Ireland, IT isn’t required, but in Northern Ireland curriculum, it is.  So it was a way to encourage teachers in the Republic of ireland to use IT in the classroom.

 Nigel did an interesting demo of how even selecting the color for the website is fraught with difficulty because of politics.  They had to spend time talking with students about things that they could say and couldn’t say as they crossed between these two conflicted countries.   This project also used Moodle with a login for students.  They found that using wikis was a good way for students to collaborate, and eliminated the problems with using something like Front Page or Powerpoint and emailing files.  

They also found that in working with teachers across several schools, it eliminated the fear that students might trash another students’ work, because wikis allow you to back up to previous versions.  The students color code their writing on the wiki so you can easily see which school has done which work.

They also used videoconferencing to connect the students.  It was pretty incredible watching the students greeting their counterparts in the other Ireland and saying “see you next year” when you think about the conflicts these two countries have had for so long.

One thing students ended up doing was writing stories, and they printed the stories from students in both countries and gave them to the participants as a bound booklet/book.

There are issues with videoconferencing and bandwidth, etc., between different countries, even two countries so close to one another.

It was helpful just to consider some of the obstacles that you would need to address in working across countries on a project of this sort, because there are quite a few that wouldn’t have been obvious.

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Will Richardson on Blogging at NECC

I’m here in Will Richardson’s workshop “Learning With Blogs” and the room is overflowing.  It’s good to hear him again, since aside from being an interesting writer and blogger, he’s also an excellent teacher.

He’s referencing a post he made on his blog about Andrew Keen’s book Cult of the Amateur, which resulted in 41 comments, a great illustration of the power of blogs to start a conversation among professionals.He points out that his blog has become his “adult curriculum” as a self-learner, and the importance of a tool like blogging in helping students to continue to learn.

 He emphasizes the power of blogs in the classroom is that students have a real audience.   The more students write on their blogs, their fluency, writing, and reading skills improve.   He made the astute point that reading is actually what generates most of the ideas that bloggers write about.   I’ve found that true in my own blogging, and that I read in a more substantive way since I’m looking for connections to write about.

He mentions the importance of network building as a skill that blogging supports, which reminds me of Andrew Zolli’s comments in the opening session last night about how networking is a skill that our students are going to need help with.   I want to think more about what these kinds of skills entail. I want to think more about what these kinds of skills entail—what are the networking skills that students need?   Connecting?  Collaborating?  Delegating?  Supporting?  Searching?   It’s easy to see how blogging would help students develop those kinds of skills, and as educators, blogging helps us model and develop those skills for ourselves as well.  

As beginning bloggers, most people aren’t very networked.  That develops from commenting on other writer’s blogs, linking to ones that interest you, and inviting others to read your site.   But learning how to build your own network as an educator outside your campus, is a way to internalize those skills.

A speaker in the audience coincidentally just was talking about this issue—what if you create a blog and no one enters the conversation?   Will pointed out that you use a blog to somehow improve what you are doing in your curriculum, not to just have a blog.  He recommended writing on your blog about something you read on another site, which brings in readers from that site, as one way to bring in some outside contacts.

He had an excellent recommendation if your district is reluctant to allow blogging—to sit down with an administrator or technology person, outline your goals for using a blog with your class or on your campus, show them examples from some of the sites listed below, and discuss your educational goals with them. 

I know in our district that opening up that conversation last summer really was helpful in getting blogs and other web 2.0 tools to be made available to all of our teachers.   We ended up starting out with one site, edublogs, open for staff and students, and then progressed pretty quickly to having most blog sites opened up to staff, and I think a lot of it had to do with us having those discussions in the district. 

He also recommended having a policy—here are our goals, potential problems, our solutions, etc. that could be shared with parents if you have concerns.   His wiki site below has links to some sample policies, and I know he has one in his book, Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts, as well.  We also discussed having students help develop the policy (Bud Hunt does this), and use a wiki to have them develop it.

Other questions—how to assess. One option is to have students make a certain number of posts per week.  Students can turn in one “official” post per week for assessment.  Students can be graded on making commentsRSS feeds are important to making blogs easy to grade.  Sites like Pageflakes allow you to view all their blogs visually. 

He is sharing Kim Moritz’s story about her blog, and how her district has finally allowed her to take the “disclaimer” off of her blog masthead, which said these aren’t the district’s views, and recommended her site, as well as Clarence Fisher’s blog, Remote Access.

He’s also sharing how 6 million people have viewed the Did You Know Video which started out as a production Karl Fisch did for his campus oat Arapahoe High School and then posted on his blog, and it started circulating around the world.  

Karl is speaking later on at NECC, by the way, and I can’t wait to get to meet him.All of these connections, as Will Richardson says, are very powerful for you as a professional and for students.    Several of our staff from our district are in this session—I can’t wait to see how it impacts their practice as well. 

(You can follow his workshop links from his wikispaces site.)   Also see a list of educational bloggers on www.supportblogging.com/links+to+school+bloggers, broken down by teacher, classroom, principals blogs, administrative blogs, librarian blogs, etc.

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NECC -- Opening Session

A few thoughts from my day and the opening session—

First off, after not connecting with folks I wanted to meet today, I ended up touring the Coca Cola museum.  But I actually ended up getting great ideas for the classroom there.

I thought about how this museum takes one subject (Coca-Cola) and then explores it through advertising, art(Andy Warhol exhibit in  the museum), video, history(displays on Coke in world war II), and food, and how we could do that easily in the curriculum with any possible subject.    Anyway, it got my wheels turning.  We miss so many opportunities to make all these connections between subjects, and this was a great example of how you can extend something in so many directions.

Then, it was to the opening session with Andrew Zolli.   One thing that interested me was when he talked about the concept of choice—how we are overwhelmed with choices.   I thought about how little we really are helping students with this issue of making choices.  I was thinking that in terms of searching particularly, and how we can help them with being selective.

The most interesting takeaway from me from that session was the last five minutes.  He was talking about what “trumps” what in terms of importance.

The four items he listed:   The personal trumps the impersonal;  tangible trumps intangible, present trumps past/future, and desire trumps responsibility.   Anyway, it made me think about when we are doing workshops, introducing software or books to students or teachers—what we should focus on is how it affects them personally in the present in a tangible way.   I also think this is a good approach to addressing change.

So I’ll be mulling those thoughts over for awhile.

Last stop was the Georgia Aquarium, unbelievably crowded, but we sat for a long time watching a huge aquarium.  I considered how the schools of fish are like all of us, milling about, some lurkers, some swimmers, some on the surface, some deep swimmers. 

Sidenote: To my dismay, Edublogs is still nonfunctional, so I’ll continue with my blogging from here.  Tumblr is actually a very handy little website!