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.
I’m reading a book about Wikipedia and somewhere around the half way point the author mentions the essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” (pdf) Realizing I had never read this often mentioned discussion of open source projects and online development, I put the book down and instead took a 35 page side track through this work.
It has me thinking about classrooms, our purpose, and how they can be the most effective.
In this essay, the author places two ways to complete a project against each other. The cathedral, which is “carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time,” struck me as the way that things are often done in curriculum development and in classrooms. Seeing our purpose as passing along knowledge, classrooms often labour along under (and as part of) a structure which is top heavy and slow moving. Everything is properly laid out and controlled. Contrast this with the “great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches,” that is often seen in things like open source software development and two very different systems emerge.
Schools have always been about finding “the best” (literature, scientific ideas, etc) that a society has to offer and passing them along to a younger generation. Yet with evidence of the growth and effectiveness of so many passion based communities involved in sharing their developments and innovations, I begin to wonder about the effectiveness of our system. Combine the bazaar, which has ideas running into each other, with Chris Anderson from TED who writes in this article about the power of crowd accelerated innovation and an understanding begins to emerge about another way education could be accomplished.
What happens when students have access to people and ideas around the globe in greater numbers? What happens when they begin to have real opportunities to work in passion based, global learning communities? What happens when they have more control over their learning? Would this put kids on paths of upward innovation spirals and engage them with learning?
These are powerful ideas for classrooms and for learning.
“Why do people go to school?
Why?
Yeah.
Didn’t your mother tell you?
She just said everyone went.
Well … they go to learn. That’s why.
To learn what?
About the world.
What for?
I hesitate. I am remembering what my wife said about being positive. I want to be positive. So they can work, I say. So when they grow up they can get a job and they can work. There’s nothing necessarily negative about that, I think.”
This is a conversation between a father and son as they walk together towards the son’s first day of school. It is taken from a fictional op-ed piece in the New York Times. While is is fiction, it poses plenty of good questions.
Is school about teaching kids skills so they can get a job? Seems rather narrow minded and Western. Is school about helping kids to see the world in a certain way? Seems rather colonial.
Shouldn’t school be about self actualization and not about productivity? Shouldn’t it be about asking questions about the world? About making the world a better place? About learning to dig deeper and see more clearly?
Three more days until my first day with my students.
- Many classrooms and schools are moving (or have already moved) a lot of their services towards cloud based computing. Everything from web based file storage to applications such as google docs have been moved online.
This is why I thought people might be interested in this new service called CloudSleuth.
Cloudsleuth monitors the speed of the internet backbone from various data centres around the world and is capable of watching individual networks and machines as well. Cloudsleuth monitors response times and uptime of services. As well, there site features whitepapers, forums and blogs all surrounding the issue of cloud computing. The New York Times had a good basic introduction article on the service as well.
If you have moved (or are moving) in this direction for your system, this is a resource worth checking out.
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lrargerich/3366007510/
I have a MacBook Pro that I use at both home and school. I carry it back and forth between work and home each day.
As I arrive in my classroom and set up my computer, I take a few minutes each day to reconfigure this machine to work on my school’s network.
It takes 18 clicks, 18 clicks of the mouse to change the settings on my machine from the open computing environment of home, to the filtered, proxy-servered world of school. I know that on a Mac I can set this up automatically based on location; but I haven’t.
Those 18 clicks of the mouse when I arrive at school, and then again when I return home in the evenings, serve each day to remind me about open vs. closed learning environments.
We have more information, but less news.
We have more information, but we understand the world less and have less perspective on global events than people in the past.
An information age paradox.
Alisa Miller in this 4 minute TED Talk explains how this has happened:
This is frightening. We live in a world in which issues that emerge in one part of the globe affect us on the other side. We live in a time when we need to understand cultures and societies on a deeper level, yet we are getting less news and less context all the time from Western news sources. Foreign bureaus close and citizen journalists (which some have described in effectiveness as being similar to citizen dentists) are expected to fill holes in the information.
So how to get information into your classroom and where to look for sources? While I am a firm believer in traditional sources such as the CBC and the BBC especially, I also delve deeply into two other places. The first of these is Ethan Zuckerman’s Global Voices Online. A home of media from around the world that are ignored by more traditional sources, I love the breadth of global voices and it how it allows people seeking information to customize it according to their needs, and also take part in the conversations through commenting.
The other site I have begun to use more and more is the English network of Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera digs deep into stories and is an essential source of news and context for the developing world and the global South. Al Jazeera journalists spend time in places traditional news sources simply don’t. While including this information source might be controversial, I think it is an increasingly important place to go for news.
I’m also finding other websites that we wouldn’t normally think of as “news sites,” containing faster moving information. Youtube, flickr and Wikipedia often are immediately updated with photos, videos and text when events happen. Searching out sources such as these, moving outside of traditional information streams and teaching students how to find and evaluate what they find online is becoming a skill that is more important for teachers and students.
Online, there are communities of all sizes. By the hundreds of thousands, some are huge stopping places that collect tens of thousands of users, while others are small, with only a few people who contribute and are struggling to stay alive.
Like real communities, each of these spaces has a culture of its own that can be read, developed and changed. New users are expected to respect the culture of a community that has already developed and are expected to know “the rules.” Not all online spaces are positive. Some are outright racist while others have a culture of respect built into them by their users and moderators.
For example, Wikipedia is a massively successful online community. With over 10, 300, 000 user accounts as of today, they have been very successful at creating a community which people want to belong to. Wikipedia encourages it users to post profiles of themselves which thousands of people have done. While there can be little personal information contained in the work that users complete on the articles themselves, many of their profiles are huge and ever expanding as people write about themselves, the types of articles they have worked on and what types of credentials (if any) they might have.
Many of these profiles are both informative and funny and people are willing to share significant pieces of information about themselves. Wikipedia even provides all sorts of banners and “barnstar” awards for people who have taken a leadership role on the website.
Wikipedia is a great example of a global community that is transparent and positive. The community is accomplishing a massive task while still encouraging their users to be individuals.
Other online communities are very different. For example, both Youtube and the CBC also have open comment systems. While dramatically different in personality from each other, both of these systems are much less transparent from the culture that has developed on Wikipedia. In both places, the majority of users have not posted personal profile pages, or if they have, they contain little information about the actual users.
Both of these sites have developed a much different culture than that of Wikipedia. In both places, comments can be outright rude and (on Youtube) filled with profanity. I believe that many of the culture “problems” on these sites can be attributed to users being allowed to remain anonymous and by a lack of, or weak moderation. Of course, the internet being a global space that is occupied by all sorts of people, these two sites are assembling a different community than Wikipedia has.
So what comes out of this? What are the lessons that can be learned for educators who may be growing online communities? I think there are several lessons to be learned:
1.) The culture of an online community is something that needs to be purposefully grown and encouraged. A positive functioning community does not emerge on its own. It needs to be guided, moderated and developed. Teachers have a significant role in this.
2.) Students need to be encouraged to develop their own space and profile online. While many schools may be reluctant to do this and while these profiles need to be checked over carefully by knowledgeable adults to ensure that students are not sharing personal information, the development of an online profile and space will help students become true contributors and members of their community.
3.) Teachers need to be present in different ways in their online communities. They need to be mentors and models, posting their own information and profiles, while encouraging students to do the same. They must be active writers and participants in the community. Co – learners and not simply administrators.
4.) Communities should grow and be open. Students need to learn to function in global online communities where they do not know all of the participants who are involved. This small scale modeling that might involved several classrooms will benefit students much more than a closed, one classroom only type of community. I know many systems have policies about the openness of their communities, but this is a battle worth fighting.
5.) Students need practice to become good netizens. Participating in online communities as a special event or a one time type of thing will do them little benefit. This needs to be a central pillar of how learning happens in classrooms.
We are still new to much of this in education so we have a lot to learn about these ideas, but the effect they can have on the learning of our students makes these things worth exploring.
