Question time.
I’ve been involved with online projects for a good number of years now. I’ve followed and gawked at dozens more.
In many of them I’ve been amazed at the creativity and great ideas that have grown. For others, (to be honest) I’ve wondered why teachers have spent the time on them.
Lately I’ve been noticing more of a pattern emerge from these projects though: the hugest majority of them are based around language arts and social studies. This isn’t a secret. I’ll admit that I did notice this a few years ago, but in the light of reports like this one recently released by the Royal Society, I am getting more concerned about this.
Knowledge, Networks and Nations is a report concerned with the changing nature of scientific development and advancement. Networked, collaborative and global, scientific developments are more and more dependent upon the ability of scientists to work with others located around the world. This post by George Siemens has a good overview of the report and the state of science innovation around the globe.
Now admit it. I will. As a classroom teacher, when we look to collaborate with others around the world, we often think first of projects that circle around language arts and social studies. These subjects allow us to use tools we are familiar with. We blog with others. We leave comments. We have skype calls to read a book together. We use wikis to collect our research on a city. We take pictures, radio plays and produce videos with others.
But the tools we use are neutral. We can just as easily be blogging about math problems as about a novel we are reading. But mostly, we aren’t. Science and math tend to the red – headed step children of international K – 12 collaboration. When working with someone else, we always say that these two are difficult to integrate (or something along those lines) and promise to get to it later. Later often never comes. After years of showing the possibilities of international collaboration, the power of projects and the excitement they generate; are we spending our time with the low hanging fruit? Are we taking the easy way out?
In light of the fact that many of our students will be heading into fields where science and math are the core of what they do with their working lives, and that science and math are becoming much more global in dynamic in their purpose, we should be searching much harder to undertake real research possibilities with the kids in our classrooms. We need to understand how working online with science and math projects are both similar and different from humanities based projects.
What are these similarities and differences?
I can’t tell you. I haven’t done enough online work with my kids in the science fields to know.
I can’t answer your central question here because I haven’t done enough collaboration outside of my school to speak to it. I blame that on being a first grade teacher, but that’s mostly a cop-out.
Reading this post made me think about my recent mullings on blogging in education. Many of the most popular blogs are resource blogs – technology, craft ideas, cute things to do with kids. The reflective, powerful, thinking blogs, while popular within certain circles, are not reaching the wide audience I would hope to see. Is this a similar problem or am I not seeing it clearly?
I would agree with you in many ways. “Reflective, powerful thinking blogs” as you call them, often challenge us and push us in ways that make us uncomfortable. It is much easier to read a blog post about a new craft idea for the classroom then it is to consider turning your classroom inside out as you think of ways that pedagogy needs to change. This blog post and the problem you mention are sides of the same coin. We like things that are comfortable and reaffirming. We shy away from challenge.
Hi Clarence
Thank you very much for this post. As a college math teacher, I have spent the last three years trying to deal with this problem. I want my students to be able to use glogster, wikis, google docs, even power point…The problem is we end up typing math – which takes far too long and isn’t formatted correctly – 2x^2 – what is that?
The pen-based tablet is the solution – students need to be able to write math and science. Our school was fortunate to receive a grant from HP and we now use pen-based tablets (1:1)to teach developmental math (and English – they type so keyboard to do both required). Its not enough to just have the hardware, we must be able to have a common workspace with students. We have collaborative software that allows teachers to ‘share control’ (making students the temporary teacher), have polls, chat, online groups etc. Students can submit a page anonymously to the teacher which can be annotated and sent back immediately. Instant reinforcement of understanding!
I have recently started a blog. In order to demonstrate math formulation, I have to snip from a word document onto the page. Why hasn’t the technology caught up? Due to the recent upswing in math videos, it seems that a solution is to have students watch someone else do math. Sure, for the student that is really struggling, being able to watch a problem solution several times gives some advantage. However, I would much prefer an interactive learning object where a students is hanging weights to see how far a spring stretches than watch videos. (The difference between watching a sport and playing a sport.)
My opinion students must be actively engaged – in our case a stylus on a tablet screen – everyone contributes to the final copy of the e-notes that are saved in a virtual binder available wherever the web is, 24/7.
Hm. Maybe try this:
Write two posts. One, a word-for-word transcription of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 63. The other, a term-for-term transcription of the derivation of the quadratic formula. They’re similar lengths. I wager one takes you an order of magnitude longer than the other, though.