| Tag Archives: learning

Ipads, Apps and NCLB?

by Clarence Fisher 3 Comments

We’ve learned over the past few years that separating our learning and thinking into silos is not an effective way to problem solve and push the limits of real learning.

Real world problems are multi disciplinary, crossing the boundaries of many people, their expertise, places and time. We need a variety of people, with different skill sets to pull together as collaborative teams in order to deeply understand and think about real world issues.

Knowing that I wonder what’s up with the popularity of Ipads and apps in classrooms?

Most apps, generally speaking, are focussed on a single task. Multiplication tables. Continents and countries. A single game. Most of these apps allow the user to focus on a single task or skill. They don’t generally reach for higher order thinking such as synthesis and evaluation. Of course there are exceptions. Calendar apps that allow people to work together. Evernote allowing us to collect information about topics and share that with other people. But overall, I don’t think it would take an indepth evaluation to see how most apps are structured.

This has left me wondering lately if the Ipad the “ultimate” NCLB machine? Is it proving to be so popular in classrooms and districts not because it is the best device for learning, but because it is the best device for focussing on small, discrete skills that are in turn the focus of standardized tests?

Are these locked down, easy to manage devices the best, easy to use computing device, or are they simply the best device for promoting a certain kind of learning at the expense of a much more open possibility?

Suddenly Endangered Educators?

by Clarence Fisher 1 Comment

Clay Shirky is talking about colleges in his recent article, but it applies pretty closely to those of us in the K-12 world as well:

“I’ve been thinking about the effects of the internet for a couple of decades now. I’ve watched industry after industry forced to renegotiate their methods and models, in the face of a medium that allows for perfect copying, global distribution, zero incremental cost, ridiculously easy group-forming: The music business. Newspapers. Travel agents. Publishers. Hotel owners. And while watching, I’ve always wondered what I’d do when my turn came.

And now here it is. And it turns out my job is to tell you not to trust us when we claim that there’s something sacred and irreplaceable about what we academics do. What we do is run institutions whose only rationale—whose only excuse for existing—is to make people smarter.

Sometimes we try to make ourselves smarter. We call that research. Sometimes we try to make our peers smarter. We call that publishing. Sometimes we try to make our students smarter. We call that teaching. And that’s it. That’s all there is. These are important jobs for sure, and they are hard jobs at times, but they’re not magic. And neither are we.”

If that wasn’t enough, the article finishes with this:

“Instead, like every threatened profession, I see my peers arguing that we, uniquely, deserve a permanent bulwark against insurgents, that we must be left in charge of our destiny, or society will suffer the consequences. Even the record store clerks tried that argument, back in the day. In the academy, we have a lot of good ideas and a lot of practice at making people smarter, but it’s not obvious that we have the best ideas, and it is obvious that we don’t have all the ideas. For us to behave as if we have—or should have—a monopoly on educating adults is just ridiculous.”

I can hear the sacred cows beginning to stampede from here.

When Does 1971 Sound Like the Future?

by Clarence Fisher

“Why then should computers in schools be confined to computing the sum of the squares of the first twenty odd numbers and similar so called “problem – solving” uses? Why not use them to produce some action? There is no better reason than the intellectual timidity of the computers in education community, which seems remarkably reluctant to use computers for any purpose that fails to look very much like something that has been taught in schools for the past centuries.”

Seymour Papert. In 1971.

Full read here. (pdf)

Taking Pictures #2

by Clarence Fisher

I used to really enjoy going for walks with my kids when they were small. Like the experience that many parents have had, it used to take us 20 – 30 minutes just to get around the block.

I never found this frustrating. I used to enjoy it. We would stop to look at everything. Ants, spiders, a coke can someone had thrown on the ground. The little flowers on the weeds growing in the cracks in the sidewalk.

It was like seeing the world through a new set of eyes.

That’s what having a new macro lens is like. I’m looking at everything in my house, wondering what it would look like through that lens. I’m looking at patterns from the knife on the pund of butter in the cupboard. I’m looking at the colours on labels.

Today I took a look at some of the Christmas baking sitting on my kitchen table.

I’m noticing the small details that I would easily overlook.

A new lens is like… well… a new lens! A new way to see the world. New knowledge, new understanding, a new way to see things.

It’s interesting and exciting.

It’s like starting a new unit in the classroom. A real project to begin with, something I can have some success with. Something that I can appreciate and jum right in to.

Taking Pictures #1

by Clarence Fisher

I love my wife for a whole host of reasons. One of those reasons has to do with the balance that she desperately tries to bring to my life.

Endless hours of work at school and at the Town Office leave me with very little free time, but she always tries to make certain that I’ve got something else to occupy my mind with.

I’ve always been interested in photography so in the past she bought me a Canon Rebel DSLR camera. I’ve used it here and there, but never made much of an honest effort to get it off of the auto setting and push what it can do.

It’s time for that to change.

To give me another push, my ever patient wife bought me a macro lens for a Christmas gift. This type of lens allows you to take pictures of very tiny things like insects and individual leaves.

So, in the tradition of others who have undertaken learning something new, documenting it on their blogs and applying it to their own teaching, I’m looking to document my journey. Given my schedule, I’m not sure how often these posts will come, but in that same vein, the first lesson I might need to learn is the fact that I need to be working on a skill regularly that I want to improve on.

Here’s the results from today’s play time.

Three Things that won’t Solve Problems in Education

by Clarence Fisher 1 Comment

Teachers (administrators, IT people, consultants, etc. etc) who show signs of having fallen victim to:

the app trap…

tool lust….

shiny gadget syndrome….

need to return to reality.

just sayin’

Series on Creativity

by Clarence Fisher

Any newspaper article that begins like this:

”Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a student. You’ve been plucked out of your classroom and dropped into a new classroom, in an unknown country. Are you able to tell, from the way you are being taught, whether you’re in a democratic or totalitarian state?”

is in my mind, worthy of reading.

This quote is actually pulled from an article about creativity in education that the Globe and Mail is featuring. Its part of an entire series about creativity.

Worth your time to check out.

A Week of Brainwaves

by Clarence Fisher 3 Comments

Joi Ito has this amazing photo posted over on his flickr stream.

It shows the brainwaves of a student over a week. It is labelled with the activity that the person was involved with over time.

Look at the times where the student listed their main activity as school. The brainwaves are almost flat. They are uninvolved.

Obviously, we’ve got issues that need looking at.

Full rights to Joi Ito.

Education as Monoculture

by Clarence Fisher 1 Comment

Evolution is a biological process that both requires and creates variation.

Variation creates all sorts of results. Some successful, some not. Most of all, variation allows results that are personalized to fit a specific niche to flourish. Variation is a powerful process that encourages many different things to take place. This gives each variation the opportunity to be strengthened, modified or left behind.

A lack of variation is known as a monoculture.

Monocultures can be powerful forces as well. Once moving ahead they can have strength and speed to spread and take over an entire process or area. But the problem with a monoculture is that they are susceptible to more nimble competitors or outside influences (such as a virus). It may take time, but once the “weakness” of a monoculture becomes apparent, it is torn down in fairly short order.

This is my concern: is education a monoculture?

Our system of education is incredibly complex. But it is being driven towards standardized learning and testing and a laser focus on academic outcomes. This is creating thousands of classrooms that are using the same books, the same websites, the same tools and the same assessments to focus on few goals; better test results and higher grades being the main ones.

As difficult as our jobs can be as classroom teachers, I don’t think that this is setting the bar for us or our kids nearly high enough.

Education, not schooling, is a process that needs to help students grow into well rounded, well grounded, creative, moral, informed individuals. Increasingly lock step curricula tied tightly together with pre programmed resources and assessments certainly aren’t going to get us there. Education and learning have become a focused monoculture tied to few acceptable goals: higher test scores, better results, fewer discipline issues.

There is danger here. Danger for us as professional educators who are losing a voice in what happens in classrooms. Danger for our students who are seeing an increasingly narrowing picture of what counts as learning and valuable knowledge. Danger for communities and nations who are going to see their economies suffer over the long term because students cannot adapt to a changing globe.

A monoculture is certainly less messy. A monoculture is more easily mandated, controlled and legislated. It is easy to set policy initiatives for a monoculture. But in changing times we need to be able to step back and take a look at our goals. There are other ways of doing things, but they are difficult and often require difficult decisions to put them in to place and to support change. They require community input, open discussions, goal setting, professionalism and trust. All things that are unfortunately sometimes in short supply.

Will Richardson has begun calling them Bold Schools. Schools that are willing to be different, to take chances and to see a larger picture. More kids, families and communities need to be engaged in this thinking. Throwing money at problems doesn’t solve them, but taking the time to think reflectively, to do some goal setting and planning will help to move things along and help us to see the power, the strength, the value and the opportunity in being open to variation.

The Desktop Model of Learning?

by Clarence Fisher 3 Comments

I don’t know a single person who’s recently bought a desktop computer.

Not one.

Combine that anecdote with the stats showing that for the first time more smartphones were sold than PCs and another that shows over the Christmas season of 2011, the number of people who owned either a tablet or an ereader doubled from 10% to approximately 19% and you can see that the computing world is in complete flux these days.

We want to take our technology with us.

Is it the data that we want to have with us, our files and pictures, or the ability to connect with others? Both?

A couple of years ago, this video was making the rounds at conferences and it seems like we are fully arriving at this point:

Our data, our connections, our services, our media, our learning. We want to take it with us. We want access no matter where we are. We what to switch from work to play and back again quickly and easily. A desktop computer used to sit in the corner of a room in our homes. It had its own desk. It was a place. Like the internet, it was a destination all its own. It was someplace you went to. “Going online” used to be a saying. I’m not sure it even applies anymore. We’re surrounded by devices that slip between internet access and media consumption seamlessly.

How do these societal trends change learning? How do they change how we need to structure classrooms? Are complete labs filled with computers an outdated model? Do we need infrastructure that is more seamless? Are classes that are focused purely on computers and technology an outdated model? Do we need more integrated systems?

Are schools still pursuing the desktop model of learning? Learning as a place, a thing that is separate and sits off in the corner all on its own when really we should be looking at something much more integrated and faster moving?

New technologies make new things possible. They allow us to move in new directions and consider new possibilities. We need to keep moving.

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