Exploding Beakers

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Ch. 11

2011-06-20T08:59:00.000-07:00

This turned out to be one of the most galvanizing chapters in the entire book, based simply on Shirky's assertion that all effective groups must negotiate three simple things he calls: The Promise, The Tool, The Bargain. To me, these three things help explain the student engagement crisis occurring in the upper grades of K-12 education.

Shirky claims that all groups contain an implicit (and sometimes explicit) promise to all members that makes the desire for a form of collective action possible. The strength of the promise makes members willing to contribute. As teachers, we routinely conceptualize our classrooms as groups of students, but it's difficult to imagine what we offer them by way of a promise that Shirky might recognize. Most of the activities that occur in the classroom invalidate the premise of a group promise, since most of it involves students acting in isolation. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that if pushed, many teachers might admit to the existence of such a promise between the teacher and the collection of students as individuals, specifically something along the lines of 'Do what I instruct, and you will pass this course'. Taken as a whole, this might be the kind of promise the school offers students individually, 'Follow our instructions and you will graduate'.

However, the kinds of classroom inquiry activities that my department has been advocating does allow for the kind of group promise Shirky discusses. In terms of science education, having students investigate elements in their school or community allows them to identify reasonable goals based on areas of interest ('we will measure the pH of the local pond' leading to a goal of 'we will help restore the pond ecosystem') lends itself to creating that kind of social consensus based not around individual rewards (top marks) but collective action (restoring the pond).

For Shirky, the tools in question are often types of social media, but even he recognizes that the group needs to find a tool that fits the needs of the group. Too often, teachers not only specify 'what is to be done' but also 'how it is to be done', robbing students of the chance to develop those crucial decision-making skills related to problem-solving and negotiating in a group dynamic. Plus, the how is often something to be done alone.

Finally, the bargain is the reward that the members of the group will get from the successful action as well as belonging to the group. Thus, rewarding a group of students with top marks is not an incentive to high-end students who might rationalize they could achieve a better performance individually, similarly some low-end students might realize that their past performance has been so poor that even superlative marks in the future will still not enable them to pass the course. The reward for cleaning up the pond might be a more interesting place for students to gather, they might earn the appreciation of the community and a sense of accomplishment, especially if an activity tied to the clean-up of the pond was how to make the pond more enjoyable with a minimal impact on the ecosystem.

I would hope that moving forward I will be able to keep those ideas of the promise, the tool, and the bargain in mind as I plan classroom activities.

It certainly seems more engaging than worksheets and readings.

Thoughts on Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Ch.10

2011-06-09T13:31:00.000-07:00

It was difficult finding a link to this chapter in terms of school reform, and perhaps that is the most illustrative thing about a chapter on the rise of Open Source software. I have already suggested that the emphasis on the school->teacher->classroom linear organizational strategy goes far to inhibit collaboration, both for teachers and students. Yes, the provincial teachers' union has its own online repository and collaborative space, but if it is a challenge to get teachers to collaborate and share between schools (although it's improving), it's even more difficult to facilitate that across districts.

The absence of a viable community of practice that meets beyond the school level made me question where it was teacher's get their new ideas from? Opportunities to meet and talk with other teachers from outside of our district takes on more importance and I think a real push needs to be made to incorporate this into city and provincial conferences and conventions. I don't think we need more presenters to teachers, but rather more facilitators of conversations and sharing sessions between teachers.

I'm sure there's some kind of Wikipedia re-invention of the K-12 system waiting to be created by someone, but I find the current system so deeply entrenched in my thinking that it's hard to even guess what that might look like or how it might function. But it's there, I'm sure.

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Ch. 9

2011-06-01T14:31:00.000-07:00

Fitting Our Tools To A Small World or how links between small-scale networks help facilitate the formation of resilient large networks. This is a very intriguing chapter, but mostly because of how foreign it feels to the school and classroom environment where we actively discourage most of our students from maximizing the diversity of their potential networks. Again, much of what we do reinforces what happens at the School->Classroom level. The number of physics' student networks at my school might be limited to one per year, if my school only happens to offer one physics class per year. My physics network might be limited to only those fifteen students who are in that class with me. If we're generous, we could double it to take into account the students who took the course last year. This is a small drop in the bucket when compared to the number of students in my district who take physics annually. Roughly 800 students write Physics 30 in my district, allowing for some degree of attrition among those who enroll but never write the exam, as well as students who decline to take Physics 30, we could easily imagine the number of students annually enrolled in Physics 20 (the precursor) to be 1000 students. Would you rather have the opportunity to be in a support network with 1000 people all having the same basic experiences and problems, or fifteen? The other school district operating in my hometown is twice as large as mine, which means we could increase the number of students in the Physics 20 network to 3000 if we allowed for some degree of cross-District interaction.

Currently these sort of connections are impossible because the starting unit of our online organization is the school.

Not the student.

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody Ch. 8

2011-06-01T13:57:00.000-07:00

This particular chapter dwelt with using online social tools to increase collaboration, often from Shirky's perspective towards some kind of social action, but as I noted in the previous chapter, schools currently do not do social engagement well (poverty engagement, meaning helping the poor, doing food drives, etc, they do better and more often). Schools also manage collaboration in a limited notion only, at least in my city.

For the most part, collaboration is limited to students taking the same course, from the same teacher, at the same time. Increasingly, out-of-school collaboration has come under fire as homework policies become revised to take into account the extra demands on student life outside of school as well as changes to assessment policies that seek to limit the amount of work done for assessment outside of the direct observation of the teacher. Furthermore, programs of choice and increased suburban cachement areas also means that students are physically tending to live farther and farther apart, inhibiting again their ability to get together.

The rise of various content management systems would superficially seem to be capable of reversing this trend, as their data capture techniques allow for chronicling user activities. However, again, we see these systems being set up to reinforce the District ->School -> Teacher-> Class file structure, with very little cross-over. Only recently have some teachers in my district started experimenting in Desire2Learn using the 'cohort' function, a tool with some potential to allow cross-class collaboration under the same teacher.

Ideally though, any online education system would give students the freedom to collaborate with any other student who wanted to collaborate with them at any given time without the current restrictions of School-> Teacher-> Class. Once students are given their unique user identifier linked to their demographic data, we have all their key School->Teacher->Class data on hand and should be able to track them across the system fairly easily. If our assessment activities are linked explicitly to outcomes from the Programs of Studies, it would not only help establish a context for student work common across all schools and classrooms, but also help foster a standard for collaboration among teachers from different schools as well.

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Ch.7

2011-05-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

This chapter was mostly on how the use of online social tools can aid in the organization and execution of collective action. It's somewhat hard to interpret or envision how these tools might function within an educational or school-based setting since, upon reflection, schools actually do a pretty good job of limiting student-based collective action. We do individual and group work often and in a variety of ways, but maybe it's time we start thinking about students and the bigger picture?

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Ch.6

2011-05-11T12:11:00.000-07:00

"Collective Action and Institutional Challenges"

This chapter looks at the speed with which resistance and confrontation to the sexual abuse committed by Roman Catholic priests in the Boston diocese manifested, organized, and became international. Shirky points out that organizers were able to do this because the cost of spreading information, as well as the cost of assembling like-minded people had fallen dramatically by 2002, to the extent that geographical boundaries no longer represented a significant barrier.

I guess sometimes we assume that all of the students present in a classroom represent a "like-mind" even though we know that each student wears multiple identities. We also know that different students bring different attitudes to school in regards to learning, particular subjects, the school itself, and even towards the nature of work expected from them by their teachers, parents, and peers. It is really difficult to consider a group of 30-40 students, brought together by geography and a timetable, to represent a "like-mind," even though much of current pedagogy appeals to teachers to develop such consensus as a precursor to inquiry activities, and related teamwork.

Shirky's comment that the Roman Catholic Church in Boston had forbidden lay organizations (that is groups of Catholics not necessarily led by priests) from organizing across parish lines resonated with my as school boundaries are always hot button topics. As Shirky said, organizations like the Church, and from my perspective schools, were developed at a time when geography represented a significant barrier to organizing institutions. Students could only walk or ride a bus so far. In the United States, policies regarding busing have become tied up in the ongoing conflicts about integration, segregation, and freedom of movement.

However, even putting aside the question of boundaries for physical school attendance, why must students be limited to work only with students and teachers co-present with them in a particular classroom, at a particular time, in a particular place? Surely different web 2.0 tools could allow students to collaborate with other students taking the same subject but at different times within the same school, or even the same district? Most online Learning Management Systems give teachers and students the ability to notify and message each other as they log into the system; couldn't students access any teacher teaching a particular subject matter for help? Most schools in my district have a dedicated tutorial period where different teachers rotate through fielding questions from students in particular subject areas (ie. each chemistry teachr shows up once a week to offer assistance for all chemistry courses). Why not extend this online? Would opening up the system to allow for collaboration across schools really be that difficult?

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody Ch.5

2011-03-23T09:52:00.000-07:00

It finally happened. I came across something in Chapter 5, where Shirky gets down to discussing some of the details of how collaboration occurs, that diminished my enthusiasm for mass collaboration and social networking as potential frameworks for organizing classrooms around. In his explanation of the frequency of user contributions to websites like Wikipedia, Shirky mentioned that they tend to follow a power law distribution (you can read a similar essay Shirky wrote on the subject here). In making edits to Wikipedia, there was a tremendous imbalance between the volume of contributions between most users and a few users. This is fine for a voluntary organization like Wikipedia, where user-members can float to their comfort level. A classroom however presents a different sort of environment in so far as we have different expectations.

Teachers are accustomed to rewarding student performance with grades. Most mass collaboration software allows for the tracking of contributions, so it is easy enough for teachers to see who has done what, and issue a grade based on frequency. Similarly, teachers could also develop criteria for contributions (ideally this would be done jointly with the participating students) so that students would understand how the value of a contribution might be judged. On the one hand, my concern is that setting any kind of parameter on what constitutes a "good" contribution is going to undermine the collaborative spirit of the venture. If we set minimum and maximum contribution thresholds, I worry that students will feel coerced into making contributions, while others might be disincentivized to make as many contributions as they would have otherwise made.

Further, and more to the point, there is a prevailing notion of fairness that teachers try to honour in the classroom, that the inherent inequality of a power level distribution makes problematic. Effective mass collaboration appears to require a few self-selected individuals to do the majority of the work willingly, allowing the rest of the users to enjoy the benefits of this labour. The classroom environment is not typically set up to reward this kind of altruism, and views it's opposite, as a kind of freeloading parasitism to be discouraged, if not punished outright. Dealing with this view will require a fundamental rethink of classroom values.

Arrival City vs. The Fraser Institute's School Rankings

2011-03-15T14:10:00.000-07:00

This weekend I read Chapter 4 of Arrival City, but since it dealt primarily with push factors in rural to urban migration, I didn't find to much to think about in terms of an educational context. However, the publication of the Fraser Institute's annual rankings of Alberta schools was published on Sunday. The report takes over 600 schools and ranks them according to government exam results. It's a fairly contentious issue, especially as the rankings also publish information on the percentage of ESL students and special needs students at the school, as well as the average family income. Predictably, schools with higher percentage of ESL and special needs students and lower family incomes tend to rank lowest. The inclusion of this data makes it easy to consider comparing schools of similar composition, but still presumes that making predictions about future government exam performances based on past performances is a valid exercise.

Arrival City helps to highlight the dangers of this thinking. In an editorial that went along with the published rankings, a representative of the Fraser Institute mused that the bottom ten schools in the rankings tended to be chronically under-performing, and perhaps educational chains from the United States ought to be allowed to operate within the province to "fix" these schools.

Without commenting on the fitness of the government exams for comparisons, or whether private groups ought to be allowed to run schools in Alberta, whether or not these schools are "failing" their students cannot be assessed strictly by exam results. A notion of failure here carries with it an idea that the students who fail these exams are doomed to remain among the poor communities of the neighbourhood. If the neighbourhoods these schools are located in are functioning as "arrival cities" as author Doug Saunders might suppose, then we need to see what percentage of students writing government exams at the Grade 3 level remain within the neighbourhood to write them again and again at the Grade 6 and 9 level. If significant numbers of students are transferring out to other schools in different neighbourhoods altogether (with potentially better exam results) we might presume that the school, and by the extension the neighbourhood, is doing a good job giving those students the tools they need to integrate into the larger society. The continued existence of low exam scores at these schools might be better explained by the neighbourhood's attractiveness to the same demographic looking to integrate successfully into the city at large. In other words, the school's success at educating and enabling a particular kind of student to leave, encourages more of the same kinds of students to come to the school.

By contrast, an under-performing school that retains a large proportion of its students might be more fairly judged to be under-performing and in need of more considered reform.

My Issue With Alfie Kohn

2011-03-05T20:01:00.000-08:00

I happened to meet a friend of mine earlier today who home schools her child. We were with a third parent and my friend mentioned the ideas of education writer Alfie Kohn. My friend was surprised to hear that Kohn's writings inform a lot of the work that I do for my large urban school board.

Granted, Kohn's ideas about progressive, constructivist education focusing on the transitioning away from such standard practices as homework and rewards are controversial, but while I find some of his ideas worth pursuing, I enjoy far more that Alfie Kohn ought to let us have a meaningful discussion about education reform.

Thus, my issue with Alfie Kohn isn't actually with him or his ideas, but rather how we go about implementing new ideas like his.

Take for example his idea that competition is counter-productive to student learning. Much of his early writing is devoted to demonstrating how deeply competition is embedded in the structure of education, particularly in the awarding of grades. In Kohn's view, grades are used primarily to rank students relative to each other, based in part on the premise that particular jobs or university seats are naturally and deservedly scarce, going only to the best and the brightest (I'd like to imagine for a second a system that allowed anyone who wanted to train to be a doctor or lawyer to try and become one). His subsequent work investigates the negative effects that grades and other forms of external rewards have on student motivation. His arrival at a constructivist position is the result of shifting the focus from external to internal student motivation.

As controversial as his ideas are, I rarely find teachers willing to state that he is wrong, or that the education system ought to function differently from what he suggests. Rather, most teachers will suggest his ideas are "impractical" and that a modern education system could not possibly function effectively as he described.

I like this argument because it puts teachers in a position to accept his premises if a practical manner of implementing them could be found. However, this is precisely where the problems tend to occur.

The first problem happens to be that regardless of whether collaboration may be the natural and most desirous state of student learning as Kohn would have it, or whether things are indeed competitive, the fact of the matter is that there now exists students whom the education system has conditioned to be competitive and expect external rewards. The few instances I have experienced, or been made of aware, where teachers have tried to create a more Kohn-esque learning environment have often reported resistance from students, leading to complaints from parents. In retrospect, I think it is fair to expect students to complain if it appears that the so-called "rules of school" are being changed in mid-stream, especially if these are the students currently reaping the rewards.

This isn't to say that students can't or won't adapt. We have much evidence that suggests they can, even in non-constructivist situations. Students adapt to different or new learning expectations every time they change schools. In fact, students often appear to expect to have to change. Thus, more thought needs to be put into how and when such reforms are implemented. In my experience, these initiatives are often the result of individual teachers experimenting in their own classrooms with the support of the school admin, but ultimately fail when they cannot achieve a critical mass in their own building.

This is the crux of any educational reform? How do you achieve the critical mass necessary to insure the reform's survival and success? Is it better to implement gradual, incremental change, starting at the school's entry level grade? Does a school need to provide dual streams when embarking on a building-wide reform, meaning a traditional and non-traditional stream? Would the one undermine the other?

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Ch.4

2011-03-03T14:25:00.001-08:00

I think this is perhaps one of the most famous chapters from Here Comes Everybody where Shirky talks about the imminent failure of traditional print media. He claims this comes from a lack of awareness of newspaper editors of their role as mere gatekeepers and failing to realize that their value was undermined once anyone could publish to the internet.

It's the idea that prompted me to pick up his book, because I'm trying desperately to consider how teachers might be functioning in a similar manner. Certainly educators in charge of curriculum act as gatekeepers when they determine what points of knowledge are required for students to learn, and classroom teachers perform similar roles when they choose which media students will use to become aware of these points.

So, the problem becomes trying to identify what the role of the teacher ought to become, and how schools and classrooms might be organized, once students can be trusted to find their own appropriate media to reach the desired learning outcomes. In my view, it is even worth wondering to what extent students should be involved in determining what particular knowledge outcomes might relevant to the courses they study.

Arrival City, Ch.3

2011-02-16T12:39:00.000-08:00

My favourite part in Chapter 3 occurs when Saunders describes the Arrival City neighbourhoods as being "richer than they appear" in that accounting practices can only measure the resources that exist within the neighbourhood, but fail to account for family members that have moved out though still maintain economic ties to the neighbourhood. Saunders writes:

"This paradox has created a sense among outsiders that the city's immigrant districts are poorer or more disparate than they really are, which leads to a misunderstanding of the forms of government investment they really need - a serious policy problem in many migrant-based cities around the world. Rather than getting the tools of ownership, education, security, business creation and connection to the wider economy, they are too often treated as destitute places that need non-solutions such as social workers, public-housing blocks, and urban-planned redevelopments."

In reflecting on previous chapters, I have suggested that perhaps school districts need to take flexible approaches to school development. The perception of a particular school's identity and social role cannot be seen as static. In this chapter, it would appear that Saunders might suggest that school districts should dialogue with current and former inhabitants of the neighbourhood about the kinds of programs that ought to be offered.

Arrival City: Thoughts, Pt.2

2011-01-27T08:49:00.000-08:00

Having just read Chapter 2 of Doug Saunders' book on rural-urban migration, I am drawn to his focus that successful transitions to the urban environment is dependent on the success of relationships being created in these neighbourhoods. This intrigues me since, as an educator, I find that those of us interested in the 21st Century Classroom, tend to talk about the new emphasis of schooling as being on the development of relationships between students, especially between students of different backgrounds. Elsewhere on this blog I have suggested that the function modern K-12 institutions is to be more socialization than knowledge transfer, and it would seem that this is in keeping with the needs of these "Arrival" districts.

One of the immediate concerns that I have though is in regards to the quality of the physical school building. There is a tendency of school districts to believe in promoting universal values and attempting to insure a minimum of standards (in this case health and engineering ones) for all students. Creating a building along these lines in shantytowns is a very jarring idea, and one that would almost force the legitimization of these neighbourhoods. On the otherhand, I am not certain that the creation of a school as transient and immediate as the surroundings would necessarily be a bad thing. I'm not sure, either way.

The one problem that I keep thinking about, especially within the context of Calgary, is that immigration to "arrival" neighbourhoods, seem to promise eventual social mobility, but what about non-arrival neighbourhoods that appear to be stagnating? What is to be done here? Is the key to find ways to make them more attractive to urban newcomers? Is gentrification a different form of what Saunders is talking about, a kind of internal urban migration?

Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky, Ch. 2

2011-01-22T19:07:00.000-08:00

I've finally gotten around to reading Clay Shirky's 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, despite having already read several of his articles (particularly on the collapse of print-based for-pay journalism) and watched a few of his talks. My takeaway from this chapter is Ronald Coase's discussion of transaction costs in the formation of management structures, dating back to 1937. Part of my hope by the end of Shirky's book is to have a better understanding of how to conceptualize the management structures inherent in the delivery of information found in our schools. While it's pretty easy to draw up District hierarchies running from the superintendent on down, I am suspicious that the route information needs to take in order for students to gain knowledge is not the same as that required to keep the lights on in the buildings.

Arrival City: Thoughts, Pt.1

2010-12-13T11:48:00.001-08:00

In Arrival City, Doug Saunders makes the claim in chapter one that certain peripheral cities, suburbs, or neighbourhoods function as transition zones for migrants. The social and economic role of these areas is to ease newcomers into an urban environment. It goes as a given then, the living conditions in these areas will be much lower than in other parts of the urban conglomeration, but still represent a step up, either in economic or social terms, than the other areas these migrants are leaving.

The problem, from an educational social reformist perspective, is how to mitigate or "raise up" the living conditions in these transition zones. But maybe, the more effective strategy is to concentrate on what happens to these zones as they build up, gaining economic and social clout, and in essence, cease acting as transition zones, forcing the urban periphery and the development of new transitions zones, further out. Perhaps this suggests we need a different idea of what a school looks like, one that encompasses a notion of different types of schools for different neighbourhoods. A school in Doug Saunders' transition zones has different social functions to fulfill than one in a more established, stabilized neighbourhood. There is a role to be played in assisting the transformation of schools from one type to another.

One of the problems with this idea however, is that the notion of different schools for different neighbourhoods also seems to suggest different learning outcomes for different neighbourhoods. The dream of educational reformers of the 1960s valued equality of outcomes for all students, regardless of locale. I'm not sure I'm ready to accept the death of that dream.

Gender Differences in Schools

2010-11-15T08:50:00.001-08:00

I came across a very interesting article in Educational Leadership today that suggested there was very little difference between the brains of boys and girls, implying that teaching strategies aimed specifically at each gender were misguided. What was different however, was the actual difference between behaviours of boys and girls, with a notion that these behaviours are reinforced through social interactions. At one point, the author even notes that gender-specific teaching strategies might actually do more to increase differences between boys and girls than to remediate them.

You can read the full article here.

Lately I've been puzzled over what teachers in the classroom, and schools in general, ought to do when faced with two different social groups performing at different levels in different curricular areas. Under a previous philosophy of schooling, it was believed that by the end of Grade 12, every student ought to arrive at the same endpoint. If a group of students were lagging behind in certain areas, extra instruction would be required. However, given that classroom time is a finite resources, extra instruction meant less instruction in something else. The current problem, as I see it, is if social groups perform at different levels primarily because of the social interactions they engage in, both in and out of school, then I question the school's ability to offset the social behaviours that are occurring in the two-thirds of the day that a student spends not in school. In essence, I no longer believe that if outside-of-school social behaviours are the causes of different performance or achievement levels that schools can produce a scenario in which all students perform at an equal level. It seems to me that an inequality of performance is inherent. Unfortunately, if the goal of school is no longer to insure an equality of outcomes, I'm not sure what the purpose of school ought to be.

So, if girls are better readers than boys, should we make boys read more? Should we cut back on gym and math time, since these are areas that boys could use less instruction? Should we do the opposite for girls? Less reading and more math? Would this make students more willing to go to school? More likely to be engaged in their learning? In this case, the push for student engagement seems in conflict with the desire for optimal learning in all areas of the curriculum. It all seems very messy.

Hybrid online courses

2010-10-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

An e-School news article from earlier this year suggests that students in online courses "do better" than students in traditional courses within a post-secondary context. It goes on to say that students in "hybrid" courses, that is a course that offers some form of mix between online and in-classroom activity, do best of all.

It's probably too early to call these studies definitive, but there's a lot of focus on the increase in student engagement that online courses are thought to create. Higher student engagement = increased student success.

However, I wonder about the extent to which online and hybrid courses offer students more opportunities to reflect on their learning. In the past, I have been critical of the pacing of traditional classes. Often on-campus activities are stacked back-to-back, to maximize a students time. Within the k-12 system, it is an endless conveyor belt of activitiy, with students not gaining an opportunity to rest until often well into the evening. I would like to think that part of what we are seeing in hybrid courses is the ability of students to select times to engage in online school opportunities that also (perhaps subconsciously) provides them with a period of reflection.

Jane Addams and Student Engagement

2010-05-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading an essay on Jane Addams, a pioneer of early 20th Century education, who was one of the first to pay attention to multi-cultural education. While her ideas have been quite influential in that regards, I also found it very interesting the way her ideas of socialized education speak to the general isolation that stems from education. Schools not only function to isolate students from their parental ethnic cultures, but also from the daily experiential cultures that their arents partake in, most notably work culture. Schools tend to provide students with a unique cultural environment that references nothing else in the lives of students except school. Addams charged that this kind of formalism prevented children from conceiving of proper ways to integrate themselves in the adult world. This also provides a unique perspective of many so-called "GenX'ers" from the 1990s who experienced significant personal distress when it came time to enter the "real world" after graduation. In fact,the 1990s saw many developments such as the "permanent student" and record increase in graduate school enrollments, the "Slacker Movement" which encouraged well-educated middle class youths to take up menial service sector jobs such as dishwashers and parking lot attendants. Even the media's fixation on something called "the quarter-life crisis", a noticable increase in the number of students who dramatically change careers a few years after graduation, underscores that even youths who made a career choice often felt it was the wrong one.

All of this points somewhat to the circular nature of contemporary schooling, although the situation has changed somewhat. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the school setting became increasingly self-referential. Students came to school and had few options to engage in activities that were not in some way related to school. The development and increasing proliferation of personal communication devices, along with access to Internet resources has given students more options and means to carry their non-school lives with them into school. Recent student engage surveys, such as those being conducted under the What Did You Do In School Today banner, are clearly demonstrating that students recognize the isolating and divorced nature of their current situation.

The problem is time

2010-04-23T15:30:00.001-07:00

As education budgets decline, it remain static in the face of increasing needs, school districts tend to respond by asking teachers to assume more responsibilities, ranging from increased instructional duties (teach more students in more classes) to clerical (tracking attendance, inputting student course selections), to adminsitrative (monitoring earned student credits, writing individualized student performance plans). Advances in technology has made some of this easier; teachers with computers in the classroom can enter attendance or grades directly into central systems with the students right in front of them, other advances, like email an online learning management systems, extend a teacher's responsibilities to students beyond the ringing Tod the tradional end of day bell. Currently teachers, especially new teachers, are under tremendous pressure to contribute to the culture of schools through volunteering to host extra-curricular activities, such as hosting clubs or coaching athletics, all of which occur at the margins of the school day.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for good teachers to balance teaching with other aspects of their lives. Good teachers often became involved in teaching as a way to incorporate and share passions and hobbies in a constructive way. Lengthening commitments to schools leaves less and less time for these other interests. Furthermore, many specialized teachers view themselves as members of multiple communities. A science teacher, for example, might view him or herself as a member of an educational community, as well as the larger science community. Similarly a
music teacher could have membership in the local music scene in addition to the education community. Again, participation in these other communities is made difficult by the increased demands of the school system, which often responds to these criticisms by giving teachers the option of starting a school-based club around these interests, thus involving the teacher ever more with the life of the school and increasing their professional isolation from other communities.

It is clear that teacher retention is an issue for many jurisidictioms and I would contend that a contributing factor is the inability of school systems to allow teachers to maintain healthy lives outside of the school day.

Books in the mail: Teach Like A Champion

2010-04-14T09:42:00.000-07:00

Doug Lemov's new book about improving classroom arrived on my desk today and I'm quite interested in reading it. My understanding of the premise is that he has developed a new vocabulary to describe teaching processes that will improve the kind of feedback that teachers receive. I'm not sure if this is what he actually does, but those are my beliefs as to the book's contents, and something I would argue are dreadfully needed in education as it's not enough simply to demand higher scores or lower drop out rates - the idea that there are more effective and less effective techniques seems straightforward, but a good job describing these has yet to be done.

One word of caution now that the book has arrived, I do take a little issue at his subtitle: 49 techniques that put students on the path to college, as if to say the whole purpose of the k-12 system is to move the roughly 1/3 of high school students who attend any form of post-secondary education (at least here in Alberta) to something resembling 1/2 or higher. It also suggests that a k-12 education that terminates in a successful high school graduation is not a success unless the student enrolls in further study.

Are high schools still sites of conflict?

2010-03-29T11:05:00.000-07:00

(cross-posted with What Sister Ray Said)

A few friends of mine recently made a passing reference to the period of time starting in the post-grunge years (1994) to some unidentifiable terminal year that has only recently passed, as being a kind of “neo-Sixties.” Their evidence, and none of them made any kind of claim to academic accuracy, was the resurgence of pot use, focused demonstrations against global capitalism (notably the Battle In Seattle and anti-G8 protests), and other protests against the “unjust wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11. While this might be superficially true, I’ve always thought that the general rebelliousness and questioning of institutions during the 1960s was much more far-reaching than we tend to remember it today. One of my favourite classes of stories was the surprisingly common one I call “The Day the Hippies Came and Took over My High School.” The number of incidences of “hippies,” whether they be actual bearded longhairs, or members of the SDS, SNCC, Weathermen, sympathetic Black Panther group, or other civil rights/anti-war group, storming the local high school to institute “teach-ins” is pretty high across the eastern US. The same cannot be said for the period 1994-present. Part of this might be the difference that the Internet has played in distributing information, but I wonder how much might also be the case that the K-12 system, and high school in particular, is no longer seen as the part of the general “system of coercion” that it appeared to radicals in the 1960s. Or maybe that idea is now just taken for granted, but attacking it is assumed to be futile. I’m not sure, but this extended 1971 quote from Michel Foucault seems to outline the thinking at the time pretty good:

“…in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class. Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, also help support the political power. It’s also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.

It seems to me that the real political task in a society in such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attach them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.

This critique and this fight seem essential to me for different reasons: first, because political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centers and invisible, little-known points of supports; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn’t expect it. Probably it’s insufficient to say that behind the governments, behind the apparatus of the state, there is the dominant class; one must locate the point of activity, the places and forms in which its domination is exercised. And because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition which makes it possible, the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other. Well, if one fails to recognize these points of support of class power, one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process.”

- from The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature

Thoughts on iBrain and engaging students

2010-03-23T09:56:00.001-07:00

Last summer I was part of a reading group that looked at the book iBrain by Gary Small. I was also part of the selection committee that picked the book. We were looking for something that would prompt teachers to think about changes that young people were undergoing both in terms of how they lived their daily lives and the way they thought about particular things. At a Reaching & Teaching presentation earlier that spring, Ian Jukes seemed to endorse the book (he might also have just as likely been name-dropping it, to give the appearance that he had read it).

After distributing the book to our reading group, and explaining our hope to have conversations around it over the summer via Twitter, we left them to their thoughts. Our efforts to have teachers use Twitter ended up not amounting to much. In retrospect, I think that had we prompted via email teachers more over the summer to use Twitter, we might have had better uptake.

When we returned to discuss the book in face to face meetings in the fall teachers quite upset over some of Gary Small's ideas. Part of the problem lay in a misunderstanding that teachers had regarding our purpose. They thought that we had picked the book in order to discuss how best to implement it, not as a discussion prompt. Many teachers reported breezing through the first few chapters, until they got to one of two parts. For some, Small's use of the word "evolutionary" to describe his idea about how children's use of technology causes the rewiring of a child's neural network, caused them to question many of Small's scientific credentials. For them, "evolutionary" refers solely to a process that occurs on a multi-generational scale - "adaptive" might have been a better word choice for what Small had in mind. For other teachers, it was Small's endorsement of a study that seemed to link TV-watching to autism. Once suspicious of Small, they became far more critical about what they were reading.

My thoughts on the experience run as follows:

1. I was surprised that teachers did not begin reading the book critically from page one. It seemed that the very fact that we suggested the book gave it a critical endorsement. Since teachers accepted our informal expertise (insofar as it went towards the book selection) they accepted that the book had a certain intrinsic merit. The conversation we wanted to have was actually about whether the book had that very same merit, whereas the conversation they expected was about how best to implement the merit of the book. I can't help but assume that this same confusion over purpose happens everytime we ask students to read something.

2. Teachers believed the book had merit, then felt betrayed when their own experiences caused them to question certain aspects of it. I think this is a very important part of the reading process, the bringing to bear of personal experience, and part of the question then becomes, how do you prepare students to read books on subjects that they do not necessarily have any experience in.

3. After falling out with Small, teachers were extremely reluctant to endorse any of his ideas, but curiously, did not link Small's idea that use of digital technologies causes a change in the ordering of dendrites, to those of Marcia Tate, of Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites fame. If you accept that Tate and Small are both talking about worksheets, ipods, and computers as tools that aid in learning, there is no real difference in their argument. I know a fair number of these teachers are big fans of Tate, so there appears to be a bit of a disconnect there.

Building a Better Teacher

2010-03-16T05:55:00.001-07:00

Last week The New York Times ran a piece on education reform. It's a topic that's quite near and dear to my heart, so I was intrigued. The article was essentially a pre-release interview with Doug Lemov, the author of a new book entitled Teach Like A Champion. Lemov's basic thrust was that teachers lack the basic vocabulary to describe the act of teaching and this undermines many of their efforts to teach better. My experiences with teachers and teacher improvement certainly validates this idea. True, teachers have no shortage of conceptual frameworks to explain and support the activities that they are having students engage in, they are considerably weaker in using language to describe their day-to-day activities to their peers. This is an important shortcoming to remedy because it prevents teachers from properly identifying what it is that's working in their classrooms as well as offering each other constructive criticism aimed at improving weak practice.

In the last five years or so, I think there has been a tremendous degree of improvement in the language of assessment; teachers have a better capacity to explain what they are assessing, when, how, and why, but assessment and instruction are not the same. I'd like to think that the one follows the other, that from a better understanding of assessment, we will be better able to zero in on what exactly students need to do better in order to understand better.

Having said that, I was a little disappointed to see that much of the article's focus was on techniques for classroom management, rather than instruction. I am intrigued enough to have ordered a copy of Lemov's book, but I find that conversations that focus on classroom management tend to miss the point. When looking at ideas related to classroom reform, I ask myself the following questions:

- who decides what the student will learn on a given day?

- who decides how the student will learn?

- who decides when the student is done learning?

People who answer these questions with "the teacher" are not moving in the same direction as me.

Undecipherable Notes: CES 2010 Higher Education

2010-02-26T20:02:00.001-08:00

Higher ed tech pt.2

Will anyone ever go to class again

***follow-up: Dreyfus initiative for civics, is it possible to consider that former ideals of citizenship, nationalism and patriotism are based on printing press techonology?

Followup: m2kidz, anytime, anywhere learning, Arizona state university using google suites throughout campus

Followup: John katzman, 2tor
Eduardo Moura, cengage learning (formerly thomson media)

***key takeaways: more time spent in online environment = more time on task and greater success. UofPhoenix assigns three staff to each cohort in a TA role, because students need feedback and guidance (always, eh?)

***LMS puts emphasis on teacher, social networks on students, and virtual worlds highlight community

How disruptive innovation will change the way college students learn?

Michael Horn, innosight institute, harvars book I read,
Suggests that higher education institutions like harvars centraliZed
Access to knowledge in one place. The rise of state colleges was a decentralizing act, furthered by the development of community colleges.
***the Internet has decentralized things even more, by changing the locus of information access from institutions to my pocket

Peter smith, kaplan higher education
University graduation process is based on training (and weeding) students based on the premise that the jobs they are preparing for are scarce. However, given and environment of
Global mobility, the scarcity of such jobs drops dramatically.

The locus of the higher Ed experience will become the governing architecture of the course, no simply the physical architecture of the campus.

Followup: kaplan higher education looks to translate existing student experiences and learning into portable course accreditation

Christopher dede wants accreditation to be based on compentency not seat time (Carnegie unit)

***key to disruptive succeses is to setup shop on the borders of existing regulations, on areas where the market is non-existent, gather market growth and then chip away at existing regulations as regulators take notice of your activity
***so what are the borders of the k-12 system?

Followup: high tech back pack companies

Key Takeaway From Kids@Play 2010

2010-02-25T19:34:00.001-08:00

Undecipherable Notes from CES 2010

2010-02-23T20:35:00.000-08:00

Kids@play
Alan Kay
Children want to learn the human universals
To be successful, a product or service must "amplify" one or more of these universals
Look at towards a theory of instruction by Jerome bruner

Low-pass filter idea? Many good
Ideas of The 1960s still lay dormant

Michael resnick
As if students had learned to read but not write

***too much of teacher education emphasises mastering of knowledge and knowledge specialization, while this is fundamentally important, the vital activity in the teaching of students is not specialized knowledge transfer, but an understanding and appreciation of the variety of activities and uses that might allow students to engage and deconstruct it.

Follow-up: scratch.MIT.edu

Family story play by sesame workshop and nokia. Appears as heavy covered book with two screens, one with video-conferencing capabalities. This allows for a partner on the other side with the same book to engage in paired reading facilitated by Elmo.

Disney is working on flash based vision recognition software that can recognize movement and text, using a webcam to interact with online
Environments

****robots are huge here, as is hardware skins and customizations, and 3D hi-def tv with glasses

Disney toybridge allows for universal
Interfaces, suggests the ability of extra-user or actor using the flash based cloud based programmer to control one of their motion sensing robots

Zoodles and leapfrog toys and sites provide parents with usage feedback - how similar is this to the feedback in students provided to teachers in our LMS?

Kevin Clark George mason university
Black college football experience
On doing social outreach: It's a long haul. You can't just build it, copy it and hand it out.

Followup: Common Sense Media

Karen cator: Obama considers education a civil rights issue and the social justice issue of our time.
Want to move to continuous improvement based on immediate data collection ***how will they do this?
Preliminary draft forthcoming online

Cator: calling for more social network use in schools to further digital citizenship developmet

FCC chairman: calls broadband penetration the engine of future economic activity

***seems to be a disparaging trend to feel that computer technology is being used primarily for entertainment and not education - this is really no different than any other piece of information technology. What, after all, is the ratio of published works of fiction to non-fiction?

Higher Education Technology
***if someone steals all my personal information, in terms of behaviours, preferences, and physical attributes but not my name and address, if they use this to create a bot that impersonates these features, have they stolen my identity? Is there not a doppelgänger out there who behaves in the online world the same as I do, but simply does not reference itself as me?

However, statistically speaking, how many other people online naturally have these attributes? What then is te difference between them, me, and my doppelgänger?

***full room, slightly older crowd, higher ed must be big money

Undersecretary of education dr. Margaret cantor
Obama Administration has the ambitious aim of producing the most college graduates worldwide by 2020
Looking to expand (introduce?) early childhood learning to prepare students for kindergarten. ***what does this look like? Is this pre-school?

**video-congerencig capabilites needs to be ubiquitious. Time for Alberta Supernet 2.0, to provide the massive amounts of bandwidth required.

***If we have the bandwidth, we could partner up with senior centres for reading partnerships, or high schools, or hospitals, or even parents at work

**is it a question of bandwidth per se, or is it a question of piping and distribution? If we treat the school like an apartment building, would we do things differently?

Follow-up: race to the top, achieve.org
**want to update graduation requirements by 25%, how will this impact graduation rates?

***part of the issue is that contemporary schooling seems out of synch with the public's desire for education as an aspirational goal. Before, in the early days of the last century, the education system was not expected to graduate everyone, and I do not beleive that every parent sent their child to school with goal of graduation in my mind, consider that none of my, or my wife, have grandparents with high school diplomas. There's a lot of talk of 1/3 of children not being ready for kindergarten, primarily in terms of language acquistion and socialization. Cantor is suggesting that these children are at risk for falling behind and finally falling out if the school system. I'm not sure this is significantly different than 100 years ago, only that no expected the Italian or Ruthenian students who spoke solely Italian and Ukranian at home to graduate, so these students lagging behind educationally and dropping out, or being shifted out of an academic track and into a technical one, was not seen as a bad, or less worthwhile, thing.

Obama adminstration is considering income based student loan repayment schemes as well loan forgiveness for students who enter careers in public service for ten years.
***might this encourage young graduates to teach for ten years before moving on to other careers? Would this higher teacher turnover promote innovation?

***is it time to push for an on-going teacher training professional development system that ties into mandatory periodic re-certification of teachers?

***follow-up: Dreyfus initiative for civics, is it possible to consider that former ideals of citizenship, nationalism and patriotism are based on printing press techonology?

Every Bunsen Needs a Beaker

2010-02-06T19:22:00.000-08:00

My family picked this t-shirt out for me while we were on holiday, in reference to some of the work I've done on twitter under the name 'Bunsens', itself a nickname relic from my university days. But while I've been modestly busy on twitter, the thought occurred to me that I hadn't really done a whole lot over here, despite a backlog of material.

I intend to change that in the coming days.

Making The World Safe For Smart

2009-09-25T18:19:00.000-07:00

From Change.org on the TED Conference:

We cannot continue to teach young people that being smart sucks - whatever type of smart they are. We cannot keep perpetuating the lie that "not caring" and "being cool" are the same thing. The challenges we face are too great for us to condition a whole generation to suppress what they're good at and what they care about. More than that, the beauty of the world that comes from discovering passion and talent is the single best force we have to counter a pessimistic, bleary view of things.

You had me at hello.

Discussion on Assessment in Science Classrooms

2009-09-12T12:00:00.000-07:00

Assessment:

Should marks be given for on-line participation? (Discussion Forums)
Is there anything in the front matter that ties into this? What can be assessed on line?
Blogs- how do you assign a grade? Is it authentic assessment?
Assessment for learning: blogs, discussions
Not all students have access to computers
Access to information makes us create assessments that ask for deeper understandings
Should we have open-book tests
Is google making us stupid? (article)
Are digital immigrants in a position to assess digital natives?
Use ipods, etc. to record student’s ideas and use this for assessment
Twitter: kids can answer each others questions. Provides immediate feedback, taking responsibility for own learning
What part are we assessing? What needs to be the focus: content/delivery
Whose work are we assessing? Cheating….whose ideas are they?
Everyone participates in blogs. Interesting ideas
Using conversations for broad-based assessments
Observations can be used to inform next steps
Damian Cooper: Over the course of the week, try to talk with each child
Blogs and discussions are very different
Using rubrics for everything, doing all project-based activities
Can/should you assess participation/behaviour
Self-Assessment
Peer-Assessment
Parental expectations
What value is self-assessment? It is so subjective…why do it?
Interviews are an important part of the assessment process
A big part of self-assessment is meta-cognition and problem solving
Use rubrics to self assess. Use of evidence is important
Assessment needs to be tied to an outcome
Transparency-kids need to know what the target is
Should we assess engagement?
Things are very different from school to school (emphasis on test scores/summative assessment?

Discussion on Resources in Science Classrooms

2009-09-12T11:57:00.000-07:00

-Students not exposed to enough nonfiction and expository writing.
-No text in Elementary grades…a common text rich in nonfiction presented in an interesting way
- Why do we focus so much time on creative writing and nonfiction reading?
- In junior high, teachers are relying too much on the text and must need to use it sparingly…move from text driven program to a more balanced inquiry-based program
- Need more teachers who are science specialists …need teachers highly skilled in Pedagogical Science teaching and learning
- Need access to these teachers…D2L, on –line discussion opportunities
- Need access to a lesson bank (province wide, easy to navigate
- Hands-on resources: on line store; approved by Alberta Ed
- SMART board: ready to use resources
- Checklist of materials integrated into teacher manual
- Equity of technology
- Library to provide examples: videos, experts, lessons, assessment strategies; well organized by grade level and topic

Issues:
- spend too much time looking for resources;
- Need more time for collaboration
- Environments conducive to hands-on science learning/inquiry (i.e. sinks in elementary classrooms)
- Isoloation … sharing needed between teachers, grades, divisions, school boards
- Time to network on a variety of topics
- ESL population – i.e. resources written in mother tongue, various grade levels, (accessible science for all)
- Access to expensive material and equipment i.e. GPS, robotics, microscopes (on a lend out system)
- We don’t just need more “stuff”, we need people to provide support in implementing these strategies
- Access to professionals in science fields
- More funding for off-site exploration (i.e. fieldtrips)

Discussion on Engagement and Collaborative Learning in Science

2009-09-12T11:56:00.000-07:00

Engagement and Collaborative Learning

§ it doesn’t matter how we engage them (technology or other wise)
§ passion- if kids are not engaged, teacher has to drag students into class
§ connecting science to their world – avoid disconnects
§ guide students to make connections
§ high school teachers are not good at making connections; elementary teachers are capable ( I teach bio, not math)
§ need to structure more connections between disciplines (esp. in high school)
§ homeroom or teacher advisor connected to a student for entire high school career – need to create relationships between students and teachers
§ teachers struggle with technology because they become “techies”
§ “passion projects” – collaborative learning
§ Virtual dissections – started by one student; spread to entire class
§ Collaboration is good for teachers, too – need to plan for it
§ Creativity – technology assists when safety or other concerns get in the way – engages students
§ The question why? Always comes up – need to make connections
§ Allow students to investigate their own questions – passion . Teacher’s role is curriculum connection
§ Kids lack creative play. Teachers need to demonstrate
§ Rigidity of school and home restricts creativity
§ Okay for teachers to admit they don’t know. “let’s figure it out together” Models problem solving
§ Technology can allow collaboration (eg. D2L, blog): kids respond to one another’s work
§ Good old fashioned group work
§ Teachers collaborating is modelled for students
§ Collaborate with home environment (eg. D2L homework blog) opens avenues of communication
§ Engagement also includes field experience, virtual museums, teleconferencing, etc
§ Digital archives
§ More equity across classes through collaboration and engagement (key experiences)
§ Teachers are moving from solo planning and delivery to collaboration
§ Some teachers may struggle with sharing their “craft” with others
§ Essential experiences
§ Intellectually engaged as opposed to just academically engaged
§ Confidence is essential
§ Literacy, numeracy and social literacy to be engaged and collaborative
§ Teach to the central themes of their lives
§ If it is real and connected to their lives, they will be engaged
§ General world news – students need to be connected to the global situation – easily done through the internet or paper - science new bulletin board
§ Use teachable moments

§ Build better citizens, not just learners
§ “test crunch” - how is collaboration, engagement affected?
§ Citizenship participation
§ Leaving the classroom – don’t always rely on technology
§ Learning is not just the curriculum – social
§ Comfort: students need to be comfortable with each other to share and collaborate
§ Engagement and relevancy is in early childhood and adult learning
§ How do we know what is engaging and relevant to our kids
§ How do we connect that passion to curriculum
§ Pressure of content in program of studies
§

Discussion on Problem-Solving and Inquiry in Science

2009-09-12T11:55:00.000-07:00

Problem Solving / Inquiry Learning

1. Technology can provide an opportunity to teach problem solving strategies through games. Student can learn a concept and then apply it.
2. We need to teach students to be critical consumers of information. So much information is now available, but how do you determine how valid or reliable the information is?
3. Technology can provide an opportunity to make multiple resources available to students for them to develop foundational knowledge. This is necessary before true authentic problem based learning can take place.
4. Some technologies can provide both exposure to technology and social interaction. E.g. Students collaboratively using a Smart board.
5. Technology and bring a wealth of resources for students to investigate – students can do research outside of class and bring their search results back to class.
6. Technological resources need to be available in order to be used effectively.
7. Technology is becoming part of our everyday lives so teaching students how to use it effectively and appropriately is imperative.
8. With so much information available through technology, inquiry questions and problems need to be really good and well thought out.
9. Technology has made inquiry easier with more information instantly accessible.
10. Using technology helps inquiry become more stimulating for students – having their questions answered promotes further inquiry.
11. Technology in the classroom provides the opportunity for teachers to model how to use it effectively and critically.
12. With or without technology teaching science is still about teaching critical thinking.
13. Problem based and inquiry based learning needs to become more student driven – students driving their own inquiry, curriculum affects this process at times when having to teach to the test.
14. Does technology inhibit authentic inquiry? Students have a problem in front of then and turn to the Internet for an answer rather than making observations and thinking through how to solve a problem.
15. Purpose of inquiry is about process, not rote memorization. Facts can be looked up quickly using technology; process of inquiry still facilitated by face to face student-teacher and student-student interaction.

Discussion on Technology in Science Classroom

2009-09-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

Technology Issues

Equity – homes, classrooms, schools, district, teachers, students do not have access to the same technologies at the same time.

Uses – can technology help create a wider range of choice for students, helping to increase their interest and ownership over their work?
- become more environmentally friendly by setting up a distribution list for homework, handouts, and notices, (use BCC function to safeguard email addresses)
- ipods, cameras, can be used to record group discussion and work during Science inquiry to aid with assessment
- e-portfolios allow for students to maintain record of work as they travel across grade levels
- video-conferencing, skype, podcasts, video-podcasts
o these can help students access an authentic audience for their work
 authentic audiences can help motivate students to take ownership
o also help to access outside experts
- virtual dissections
- calculators for graphing and statistics
- Read & Write Gold, Dragon Speak for help with reading and writing
- E-text books can allow for customization and increased interactivity
- Twitter can be a good tool to encourage classroom “talk” both inside and outside of the classroom, as students can ask questions of the teacher and their peers
o Still need to help students feel comfortable raising their hands and asking questions in a face to face context
- Having technology at our fingertips may be taking away from some of the inquiry (ie. Deductive reasoning, problem-solving, critical thinking) skills as answers are expected “immediately”.
o Requires an understanding of online digital literacy
- Bert Church School is experimenting with the use of iTouch

Some students, teachers, parents are overwhelmed by technology.

Just because students are connected doesn’t mean there are learning – we need to use technology to support them in learning.

Teacher tech-phobia is not a credible excuse for avoiding technology

It’s important to use technology where it makes sense to enhance learning

Not every student wants to be a Digital Native

What role can digital games be used to support learning and development of interpersonal skills?
- game-based learning meet children in a forum/learning situation they’re familiar with

To what extent does technology favour active or passive learning?

Needs:
- IT Departments need a better understanding of student needs, teachers need a better understanding of network security issues.
- Better understanding of effective uses of technology, technology not always necessary
- How do we move beyond the novelty of technology towards more effective uses?
- Establishment of provincial definitions of 21st Century Students and funding to insure it is matched across the province
- Establishment of an online science clearinghouse to help track new resources for the upcoming science curriculum

On Privacy

2009-07-25T19:34:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of talk about the need for privacy, especially online privacy regarding personal information. I would agree that users, regardless of their age, need to be aware of the kind of information about themselves that they are spreading online and who might have access to it. It's not unheard of for companies to collect information as a form of market testing or consumer research without informing visitors to their websites.

Discussions regarding young people and privacy however, also tend to talk about the amount of self-disclosure that young people do on social networks. It's particularly common for older people to be shocked at the photos being shown, or to bring up rumours of applicants being turned down for jobs based on things that are mentioned or shown on their Facebook/Myspace page. This is the kind of notion of privacy that I find interesting because it seems to argue that the idea of "privacy" is a static one - that what constitutes a private moment for baby boomers would be the same as for the so-called net generation or the even more so-called "Greatest Generation" (that pre-dated the boomers). All one as to do is read newspapers from different periods and look at the kinds of activities that are mentioned for prominent citizens and what can see that definitions of privacy have changed over time.

Notions of scandalous behaviour have also changed between generations and so I think that a lot of these pictures on social networks of ill-advised behaviours might not be shocking one day, perhaps once all the baby boomers have retired.

Protein Synthesis vs. Interpretive Dance

2009-07-24T18:05:00.000-07:00

In all honesty I've been looking for this video since my wife saw it on 16mm film back in university. The title says it all.

On Multi-Tasking

2009-07-08T16:11:00.000-07:00

Recently I've been reading iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, by Gary Smal MD, and Gigi Vorgan. It looks at the how thought patterns and brain development are affected by new technologies. I was intrigued by the idea that reading something from a book might involve a different cognitive process than reading the same thing online.

The most recent chapter dealt with multi-tasking and recycled some of the familiar studies arguing that multi-tasking is not necessarily more efficient that proceeding through tasks in a linear fashion. From there, it is suggested that students who "multi-task" are doing themselves a disservice and as teachers we might want to encourage them to return to a single task methodology. Without doubting that in some cases, multi-tasking might be less efficient, iBrain made me wonder about the experimental design of some of these studies and their fitness for comparison with the ways that students actually multi-task. The one study that Small briefly explains had participants attempt to solve math puzzles while being also being asked to identify shapes. The result of this switching back and forth between tasks required more time.

It made me wonder however, how many students actually attempt to solve their math homework and their art homework at the same time (or say work on science and English simultaneously)? My own (completely anecdotal) observations of students "multi-tasking" involve them working on homework from one particular curricular area, while listening to music, watching TV, chatting to friends, etc. Listening to music or watching TV are rather passive activities, and students talking while working is nothing new. I don't feel that the extent of the disturbances for these activities would be as great as having to switch cognitive domains.

I would like to see more studies that focus on this kind of "parallel-tasking".

Is K-12 Shifting Towards Tacit Knowledge?

2009-06-22T14:33:00.000-07:00

A lot of conversations that I've been a part of recently have emphasised the need for "deep learning", "active learning", "authentic learning" or "learning in the real world", etc., and at heart it seems to me that all of these activities appear to place an emphasis on students doing something rather than memorizing something. The role of the teacher becomes one of coaching students how to do things better, how to become a critical thinker, or a keen observer and so on. To some degree these kinds of activities appear to fall under the category of "tacit knowledge", or a kind of knowledge by doing that is hard to capture and explain. Most physical activity falls under this category of knowledge. Tacit knowledge is often contrasted with explicit knowledge, defined as a knowledge of concrete things like facts or discrete concepts.

The odd thing about these conversations between educators is that there is never a reference to the distinction between these forms of knowledge. I know that my professional education was surprisingly mum on the difference, but it would stand to reason that particular teaching techniques would be more successful in dealing with particular types of knowledge. It is notoriously difficult trying to get eastablished teachers to change their practice and I can't help wondering whether being able to draw a link between teaching practices and the transfer of particular knowledge types might be helpful.

Transient Thoughts

2009-05-17T21:44:00.001-07:00

I am coming to believe that what we call schooling has as much to do with learning as professional ballroom dancing does to actual dance.

A Conflict Between Two Paradigms

2009-03-23T09:05:00.001-07:00

On Friday a colleague and I had a lazy afternoon conversations about what happens when two groups interact with each other around a common purpose. The only problem is that each group is operating under radically different assumptions but believes that these assumptions are shared by the other group. We were thinking of course about the differing viewpoints that students and teachers might have about school, communication, and technology.

This morning we stumbled upon a video posted by Angela Maiers, who we've been following on Twitter for a long time now. Angela's website is dedicated to 21st Century Learning and is a treasure trove of resources.

The Power of Twitter

2009-03-22T09:11:00.000-07:00

Twitter turned three years old last week and has earned a lot of recent press regarding it's phenomenal growth last year (reported in some cases as reaching 1400%), but the more critical coverage has been based on Twitter's expanding search functionality. There's a good summary article at the end of our post.

In my recent joint ADETA presentation on mobile learning we talked about Twitter as part of an integrated new approach to schooling. What we liked about Twitter was that it allowed students to have conversations based not on geographical proximity, but on ideas and themes. Twitter's search function makes this possible, allowing students to find timely access to information they need, regardless of where in the world the informants happen to live. Similarly, the topic based nature of Twitter conversations enables students to ask questions and receive help from experts in their field.

Of course, one of the problems with information relaid via Twitter is it's accuracy, and so teachers would do well to encourage students to test the veracity of such information, a fitting skill in this day and age.

To read the article, click below.
http://www.winningtheweb.com/twitter-future-search-google.php

Another tidbit from SXSW'09

2009-03-18T20:08:00.000-07:00

As more and more educational processes occur online and student collaboration gains grounds, teachers need to re-think the kinds of activities that students engage in. Derek Powazek has a few suggestions:

Gaming and Educating

2009-03-18T19:57:00.000-07:00

This clip is from the SXSW 2009 Interactive Conference. If I wasn't presenting last week at the ADETA Conference, this is where I would have loved to have been. Maybe next year.

ADETA09

2009-03-18T19:55:00.000-07:00

The adeta conference concluded on Friday and I was quite surpised by how many people stayed late in the afternoon on Thursday to see my presentation on mobile learning. It is a hot topic and I hope they weren't disappointed. Aside from the apparent gathering momentum of twitter in education, one of the things that pleased me most about the conference was the prevailing attitude among a significant number of educators. For a lot of these teachers, there appeared to be a realization that technology in the classroom needs to be about more than just a way to deliver remote content. Quite a few presenters seemed to echo our own mobile learning theme that if students can acess content from anywhere at anytime, then what are we doing with them when they are actually with us in class (do they even need to be in class?). The problem seems to be that the teachers who hold these beliefs do not know where the next step needs to be. The exhibitors and administrators at the conference still seemed to be hung up on the content delivery paradigm. The momentum for change appears to be there, we just need to figure out where to direct it.

Monday Mutterings

2009-02-16T10:26:00.000-08:00

While we are still digesting the after effects of teacher convention and presentations by the likes of Alphie Kohn and Stephen Lewis, we've come across this little gem of a blog posting:

http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/the_tempered_radical/2009/02/creativity-is-dead-ken-.html

Stephen Lewis At Father Lacombe

2009-02-05T13:41:00.000-08:00

I was lucky enough to hear Stephen Lewis at Father Lacombe High School in Calgary today. Mr. Lewis was invited by the student population to come and speak on the United Nations' Millenium Development Goals, as part of the schools on-going desire to further the work of former Sudanese student Simon Atem. Two years ago, Atem participated in the online student video organization Quantum Shift's student activist project. Other students at Father Lacombe filmed Simon talking about his desire to raise money to build a school in his Sudanese village after graduation. Released on www.quantumshift.tv, the "Simon's Project" quickly made an impression, where it was the fourth most viewed video, and helped Simon raise a significant amount of money, as well as earning the attention of several key individuals and aid agencies that are now helping Simon build his school and improve local conditions.

On his own, Mr. Lewis is a passionate and engaging speaker as he talks about the many challenges facing Africa, but his talk was most impressive when set against a backdrop of high school students looking for ways to help their fellow students around the world. Simon and several other former students at Father Lacombe are a part of Sudan's Lost Boys generation. As both the students and Mr. Lewis pointed out, the problems faces by Africa regarding the rights of women, the spread of AIDS, rapidly escalating food prices, barriers to education, war and corruption, are very real and dramatic, and will only be exacerbated by the financial crises.

Though the problems seem insurmountable, and are indeed large, as Mr. Lewis responded to one student who asked if he ever thought of giving up, the answer is in believing that we can make a difference. Father Lacombe High School, a school that is perhaps in the midst of its own renaissance, can attest to that.

Closing Conference Conclusions

2008-11-19T20:50:00.000-08:00

So the Alberta Teachers' Association Science Council's Science Teachers' Conference concluded this weekend. It was held in Calgary for the first time in recent memory, and myself and my colleague Brian were part of the organizing team.

The first takeaway of the weekend was that being on the other side of the registration table is a vastly different experience. Problems arise and need to be dealt with, and the overhead view is quite different from what you get moving session to session.

The second takeaway is that volunteers are important. Organizers and programmers can design a wonderful set of speaker sessions but without enough volunteers A/V material doesn't get delivered to the proper rooms, giveaways never get handed out, and speakers don't get picked up at the airport.

That said, the conference was a fantastic experience, even though I only managed to make one session - that of University of Calgary professor Dr. Leslie Reid. Dr. Reid related her attempts to redesign her undergraduate geology course to move it more inline with Assessment For Learning and Focus on Inquiry methodology. These are the same things that many Albertan teachers are trying to do, except that Dr. Reid is carrying it out with 400 students in a university lecture hall.

Instead of attending sessions then, I spent most of my time talking with fellow conference-goers like Frank Jenkins, who helped define large parts of the Chemistry curriculum, and with whom I briefly chatted about the early efforts to reform high school science in Alberta during the 1970s. Bernie Galbraith, who received the ATA Science Council's Long Service Award, was in a similarly reflective mood.

A first for the conference was the organization of a Science Education Leaders Day where Science Alberta's Hyacinth Schaeffer and her group of Fort McMurray teachers talked about their efforts to create a school culture conducive to science education.

Next year, the goal is expand the circle of conversation, hopefully drawing in more post-secondary voices, as well as more French Immersion sessions and First Nations, Metis, and Indigenous perspectives.

Foucault vs. Education

2008-11-01T08:54:00.001-07:00

We've attached a link to an article applying the ideas of French philosopher Michel Foucault to education. Much of it is taken from his work on the underlying philosophies of prison systems, Crime and Punish, and it's somewhat scary to consider how similar the two institutions are - however, if you remember that the purpose of education is (considered by some) to be the development of the individual while that of prison is the rehabililation (redevelopment) of a corrupted individual, the analogies become much clearer.

There's certainly lots to consider about the subtle effects of the school system, but one of the immediate take aways is the suggestion that increasing persistance and sophistication of surveillance of students will result in an arms race between students and the administration. As schools take ever greater measures to observe and monitor their students, those students reluctant to be a part of such doings, will resort to greater and more underground efforts to avoid detection. Thus, there would appear to be a natural limit to how much policies such as lanyards and closed circuit televisions can curb student behaviour.

Here's the link: http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~auderey/Applying%20Foucault%20to%20Education.pdf

Facebook is the New Outlook

2008-09-15T10:35:00.000-07:00

Last week Techcrunch posted a story on the troubles of Microsoft in maintaining it's market position under the headline, "Facebook is the New Outlook". Granted, the Techcrunch article is a lot more about Microsoft, taking Facebook's status as the dominant communication platform among younger online users. This was something our colleagues over that The Daily Wenzel already speculated about.

Why is this important to educators? If Facebook is the new Outlook, where is your District positioned if it still bans student email?

Lessons from Google Chrome and the Changing Landscape of Science Education

2008-09-13T06:17:00.000-07:00

As we mentioned last week, we were very interested in what Google Chrome had to offer. Since it's release, it has essentially been our default browser. The user experience has so far been similar to that of Firefox or Safari, but perhaps a little faster, a little more stable, but since we don't really do anything fancy with our browser, it's basically the same. However, Google Chrome has nevertheless provided us with an "Ah-ha!" moment. As part of their backstory, they mentioned how the nature of what a browser does has evolved dramatically over the last few years, and the inherent structure of a web browser was designed to do something different. Imagine the efficiencies, Google asked, if you started from scratch, knowing all the current things a browser had to do.

That idea became particularly poignant yesterday for two reasons:

1. The District server went down yesterday and our office was stunned by how little physical work we had to do. All of our correspondence had transitioned to email, all of our referring documents were hosted on the server. Once all the face-to-face meetings were over, and we caught up on filing, there was little else to do other than old-fashioned pen-and-paper planning for the upcoming week. It was shocking how much had changed - five years ago the office would have been far more functional in the absence of online connectivity. For teachers in the classroom, the effect was more muted, but there nevertheless.

2. As part of our job, we are tasked with providing the School District with equipment lists to stock all new schools before they open. Since the District opens a new school almost every other year, the Science equipment list is something of a running item. I inherited my list from my predescessor three years ago, who last had to revise her list the year before. It is, and was, a pretty basic list of material, posters, books, beakers, test tubes, thermometers, chemicals, pendulums and so forth. However, within even the last three years, the numbers of smartboards in our District has mushroomed, and bluetooth connectivity has appeared in printers, smartboards, projectors, and laptops. Looking at the school start-up lists, I wondered if it was time to go digital?

Certainly such a change cannot be made without consideration: can digital equipment such as multi-sensor handheld probes over a more diverse student experience? Are there physcial skills from more "analog" equipment that students are still required to learn? What are the effects of Jr. High students working in an all digital environment as they transition to high school and post-secondary institutions that might not have made similar changes?

Google Apps Follow-Up

2008-09-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

Last week we gave an inservice on the potential uses of various Google applications for teachers and students. One of the teacher participant mentioned that it appeared Google was trying to create a seemless user experience to keep people within the "Googlespace". Little did we know how much of a reality this would be as Google announced it's new browser this week, Chrome.

Promising a smoother and more memory-efficient environment, we at Exploding Beakers are currently testing Chrome out. Chrome can be downloaded here.

We also know that graphic novels are a new area study for some schools and programs, and so we would recommend checking out the comic book that Google developed to explain how Chrome functions. What we liked about it was that it is a good example of how technical information can be communicated using the same techniques we usually associate with fiction. Check it out here.

Off and Running

2008-08-26T21:17:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow we'll be at St. Brigid's School offering two professional development sessions for teachers: the first on video-conferencing and telecolloborating, and the second an introduction to Google Apps.

A brief outline is as follows:

Introduction to Video-Conferencing:
1. Brief overview of the two main uses of video-conferencing, the first as a chance to level the equality of access to different experiences, specifically bringing content to the classroom. Perhaps more rewardingly though, is the role that video-conferencing can play in furthering school-to-school projects.
2. The main system - our District chiefly uses the Polycom Video-Conferencing hardware and software, with stand-alone, portable, and desktop units in use at different locations.
3. The alternative - SMART's Bridgit software allows users to link up and share what's happening on their SMARTboard screens. Not really "video-conferencing" but collaborative all the same.
4. The potential alternative: Skype, or other voice-over-internet-protocol has the potential for some great one-to-one interactions.
5. Resources such as 2Learn.ca and www.CILC.org that promote video-conferencing and school-to-school projects.

Introduction to Google Apps
1. Setting up a Google Account and iGoogle.
2. Gmail, Google Calendar.
3. Google Docs - creating, sharing, collaborating on a document.
4. Blogger.
5. Google Lively.
6. Google Reader, RSS in Plain English as a metaphor for teaching in the 21st Century.

The Beginning of the End?

2008-08-23T20:14:00.000-07:00

An interesting idea has been floating in the back of our minds this week, based on three separate incidents, two of which came our way via Google Reader and RSS feeds (something we point out, only because we are preparing a small presentation on Google Apps for teachers and administrators on Wednesday, something we'll talk about shortly), and the third based on a chance encounter earlier this month.

The first bit of news was that Amazon is set to offer a student edition of their Kindle reader, to tap into the growing demand for digital textbooks. Having dealt with some of the possibilities inherent in placing digital versions of texts in the hands of teachers and students, we believe that increasing the availability of digital textbooks will ultimately increase the number of teachers and students who take advantage of the manipulative and impermanent nature of digital text and use to craft more engaging, interactive learning experiences.

The other bit of news came from TechDirt, in which they mused about letters to the editor, and in fact the whole process of hard-copy letter writing in the digital age. One of the interesting aspects of the article was an excerpt from Vice Magazine in which the magazine complains about the lack of letters they receive, as compared to earlier in the magazine's history (presumably before email became commonplace). One of the oft-echoed complaints about "correspondence" in the Internet Age is that it does not translate into action, and in fact, masks a kind of passive consumption of media (as if it were somehow greater than the passive consumption of television). During the past year of writing this blog, we have yet to hear any feedback online. We are, both here and at The Daily Wenzel, to write our blogs in the middle of an actual geographically based community and often encounter people on the street who offer their comments. For the record, The Daily Wenzel, publishing since 2006, has received perhaps a dozen comments in that time, chief of which was a hard-hitting critique of their interpretation of philosopher Paul Virilio (see, Virilio vs. Facebook).

The last piece of the puzzle stems from an encounter with a pair of much older teachers who firmly endorsed the criticism's mentioned above. Modern technology, they offered, created isolated individuals - a point that we would agree with, though we were surprised at our surprise at watching them make entries in their paper dayplanners.

How will these teachers relate to students who arrive to their classes to with their Kindles and their iPhones looking to compose assignmnets online and then email them to their teachers?

The problem, as we see it, is partly as follows. If students are embracing digital technology to the extent that within five-to-ten years high school and college students will exist in world that is comprised almost exclusively of digital resources and digital communication, to purposely exclude oneself from this world is dangerous and, one might say, irresponsible. Yes, reliance on modern technology, as with anything, requires balance and guidance, part of what the teaching profession is meant to offer to students. Teachers need begin their engagement with students at the place where the students are, and then begin to move them towards a desire destination (hopefully arrived at through a combination of student goals, teacher goals, and government regulations). The teacher that stands imperiously at the front of the class demanding students to be at a particular location, claiming perhaps that they are holding the line on "standards", is facing a very hard uphill battle.

Many industries are facing difficulties in dealing with workplace cultures that span generations ranging from the so-called "Greatest Generation" of the Depression and the Baby Boomers, to Generation X and the Millenials. Unfortunately, it seems that in education, the stakes are higher.

The Paradox of Education

2008-08-12T20:53:00.000-07:00

We are in a society that values the results of education.

We are a society that believes that education is the right of every child.

We are a society that believes education can unlock the potential of every child.

The role of teachers is to help maximize the potential of every student.

Research consistently points to the in-class impact of out-of-class problems related to immigration, language acquisiton, social integration, employments, diet, abuse, and notions of "class perspectives" on the role of the home in education.

Processes are already underway to extendthe reach of educational insitutions into the spheres, often in colloboration with health, welfare, and police agencies.

The conclusions that can be reached is that the best educational results can be obtained in situations where the educational system assumes control for all aspects of a child welfare, establishing a baseline of expectations.

This raises the spectre of the return to residential schools carried out on a grand scale for the majority of families.

If phrased this way, the above mentioned scenario is not only undesirable to parents and teachers, but reprehensible.

Some educators used to make reference to "equality of opportunity" relying on interventionist educational policies that aim to redress educational deficiencies stemming from out-of-school factors; i.e. schools with large populations weakk in reading or math receive considerably more time on these subjects, often to the detriment of others like history, science, art, and physical education, since the length of a school day is finite.

It has been suggested that the end result of this will be a kind of apartheid class-based educational system where students of upper class families are taught management techniques, middle-class students learn team-work and role-playing, while the lower classes are rewarded with lessons on following orders.

This then becomes the teaching paradox: if we can not stomach to support the best methods available to achieve our desired results, then what is it we really desire from our educational system?

How Deep Is Your Love (of Bias)

2008-06-19T09:28:00.001-07:00

This past week has been dominated with sessions, discussions, and presentations at the ADETA e-learning conference at the University of Calgary. One of the common themes that routinely crops up is the comment that "Things have changed. Technology has stood the old paradigm on it's head." Often these kinds of comments are made in regards to various social applications and so-called "Web 2.0" apps, though the most succinct one I heard was made in reference to RSS feeds via the short video, "RSS In Plain English". Basically, the Plain English video said that in "the old model" (without really explaining what the old model was), the reader went out and found information, where as in the new model, the information came to you.

This is an important distinction and not just for web apps. There is a notion that basic educational processes are in need of significant change, now that information is freely available. The "old model" of education is one based on the following precepts:

1. Information is hard to find.
2. Information is hard to understand.
3. A teacher is someone who has already found and understood the information.
4. A teacher's role is to help others understand this information.

Essentially, this a picture of informaiton scarcity. The development of boards of education serve to define and train teachers, while the emergence of sanctioned curricula introduces the interesting wrinkle that not all information is equal, nor is all of it desirable. Textbooks help to deal with the idea that the information students are required to know needs to be gathered in one place for them, that they are lacking in the skills needed to process and evaluate the information on their own.

Many people at the conference here, have suggested that this is paradigm that new tecnologies have overturned. No longer do students need to be told what to learn, or to be limited to learning solely what's in the curriculum. Sort of a no more fences approach to learning.

However, hidden even deeper behind this is the basic idea that the process of education is about information transfer. It's been stated several times during discussions, and we've even said it in a previous post here on Exploding Beakers. To suggest that education is simply about the transfer of knowledge is to still rest on the image that the student is an empty vessel or blank slate that needs to be "filled up" by the teacher or educational agency. Listening to discussions where people are excited about the implications that new technologies have for education, and they all talk about the creative abilities they offer students. But where is the call for students to create new knowledge in curricular documents? This I think is the new challenge for educational reform, and one that truly places the emphasis on students and student learning.

RSS Feed

2008-06-17T08:50:00.000-07:00

Can't believe I haven't added an RSS feed before, but there it is.

Microsoft Worldwide Telescope

2008-05-13T10:46:00.001-07:00

Earlier today we downloaded the Spring Beta for Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope, their attempt to answer Google Sky. Our initial impressions are that while late to the field, MS has at least done a good job. We are quite enthusiastic at this point,especially the guided tours part, and hope to post more cohesive thoughts in a few days.

Download your copy here.

Science 2.0

2008-04-28T13:14:00.001-07:00

Ok, forget the 2.0 moniker - hold your nose if you have to, but here is an interesting article documenting some changing work habits among academics. It's called Science 2.0, not really because it's a reinvention of the scientific process, but rather because it talks about the application of web apps to scientific endeavours in academic settings. The point to take away from this, potentially, is yet another example of how institutions of learning can try to use some of these tools, like wikis and blogs, to increase a students capacity to work with and learn from other students.

The Consumption of Post-Secondary Education

2008-04-25T06:35:00.001-07:00

The following entry owes much to discussions I've had over with the folks at The Daily Wenzel and has been cross-posted with them.

Let us begin by acknowledging that the following rests somewhat on the ideas of Thorstein Veblen, Theodor Adorno, and Max Weber. You would also be correct to guess that the conversation revolves around "class", ie. "working-class", "middle-class", and "upper-class", though such labels bring to mind specific occupations and our talk deals more with social outlooks, values, or beliefs, independent of specific occupation.

To begin with, we believe in the value of studying popular culture. We believe that popular culture is an important vehicle for the exchange of ideas. We subscribe to the Journal of Popular Culture, although we are increasingly disappointed with the approach that the journal is taking to the study of popular culture. For years though, we have been unable to describe just what it is that makes us unsatisfied with it. Perhaps now we are a little closer.

Thorstein Veblen is noted for his ideas about the consumption pattern of social classes, specifically that people tend to follow their social betters. For example, in the nineteenth century, the houses of the rich had large rooms for receiving guest, while middle-class homes developed the parlour. Working class structures attempted to mimic this to the best of their abilities, given their often cramped floor space. Or, take kitchenware. The upper classes, it is assumed, eat meals off of expensive plates, and many families (of middle and working-class status) have special dinnerware (china) that they save for "fancy" occassions, where family members are dressed up, and elaborate, and sometimes expensive, food is served.

There is a crucial difference in the consumption trends between the social classes though, and that is the degree to which each class is able to make their wealth "work", that is, function as capital. For working-class families, much of the wealth is tied up in the family home, and generally not available as ready capital. Middle-class families tend to be to convert some of their wealth into capital in the form of stocks, bonds, etc., while the upper-class is assumed to have ready supplies of capital on hand not just for stocks, bonds, but also for business start-ups and such.

According to Theodor Adorno, there is also a difference in the relationship of these groups to popular culture. If we allow the division of popular culture into so-called "high-brow", tending to carry with it moral messages, or intellectual overtones, and "low-brow", popular culture that tends to satisfy emotional needs, it is generally assumed that the upper-classes favour popular culture that is "high-brow" and working classes favour "low brow", with the middle-classes enjoying a spectrum of both. Adorno was also one of the first to articulate the belief that popular culture (or what we might term "mass commercial culture" as opposed to "folk culture" both of which tend to be wrapped up in "popular culture"), could also function as a method of pacifying the working classes. Later writers on consumption, such as Conquest of Cool author Thomas Frank, and even in his own way, John Leland, author of Hip: The History, have suggested that richess of popular culture's emotional experience and the desire of novelty on the part of the working-classes, are effective ways of bleeding off wealth from that same class.

At it's heart, this kind of argument rests on the same sort of self-denial premise that Max Weber put forth. The so-called middle-class thrives under capitalism because capitalism reward self-denial in favour of disciplined investment. The working-class on the otherhand, fails to "get ahead" because it is too interested in self-pleasure. This is also typically the premise behind many of our rags-to-riches stories.

So, our question becomes, do these two social groups have different viewpoints on the purpose of post-secondary education? We would argue that there are (at least) two different social groups present in post-secondary institutions, those who view it in terms of self-denial and self-investment, and those who do not. To reference Veblen, for this second group, post-secondary education is not seen as a utility, but as a social goal attained by higher social classes. The proliferation of courses dealing with topics of popular culture, that treat it as an area of relativistic meanings and interpretations (a sort of atomizing of the audience) and not as the basis of praxis, enable post-secondary education to be consumed as novelty items and effectively bleeding off the wealth of students and student families.

Thus, the attainment of post-secondary education has generally been seen as one of the most effectives of social mobility, but we are increasinly wondering whether or not this remains the case, and whether more and more courses about popular culture are in fact undermining this effectiveness?

Those Who Can Teach, Those Who Teach Do

2008-04-06T06:58:00.000-07:00

There is a very interesting conversation going on at Weblogg-ED, concerning the role of teachers as experts in light of a new term called, "produsage" from Axel Bruns' Blogs, Wikis, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. From the synopsis provided, and the ensuing conversation, one of the main points being made is that if students are to view teachers as experts in Web 2.0 tools, then teachers need to be actively engaged in using those tools themselves. This led to much discussion around the general notion of teachers as experts, a term many teachers appear to be uncomfortable with using to describe themselves, as well as to some debate regarding just what a teacher is an expert in - is it content area, information transfer, or both?

We would submit, at the secondary level at least, that teachers are, or need to be experts in both. Clearly, the difference between a scientist and a science educator is the expertise that the educator has in allowing/facillitating the transfer/gaining of science knowledge in someone else. Part of this process involves understanding not just what consitutes "knowledge" in a particular discipline, but also what "knowledge" is worth transferring in a socially constructed process, and what can be left for self-discovery. To do this, one needs a certain level of expertise in the content area one teaches. Modern staffing though, that only deals with full-time or half-time equivalents, makes this problematic and occassionally leads to scenarios where teachers end up teaching subjects they have no expertise in, solely because the timetable needs a teacher in a classroom.

Another wrinkle in this problem is that teachers need to viewed as experts in their content area by students, so that students can trust that the knowledge they are receiving is accurate and authentic. This becomes highly problematic in certain subject areas. As science teachers, we are very impressed with our colleagues in music, drama, art, and phys. ed, in that they are always talking about the non-teaching community activities they are involved with; ie. so-and-so is playing on this sports team, appearing in this production, or performing with that group, all of which grants them a degree of authenticity that it is hard for science teachers currently to match. When was the last time any of us was engaged in scientific research, production, or other activity related to our field?

One the ideas that we've been trying to develop and shop around here at Exploding Beakers is the idea of the Summer Teacher Internship, that would see teachers placed in science organizations for a week or two over the summer. So far it's just a dream . . .

Schooling is a Social Function

2008-03-30T09:53:00.000-07:00

Supposedly, Mark Twain once wrote, "Don't let school get in the way of your education," suggesting that there is a difference between "school" and "education" even though most schools and school districts would define themselves as "learning" or "educational" institutions. Perhaps though, the idea that Twain had in mind, was that an education revolved around personal interests and experiences (a la "my education"), whereas a bureaucratic institution such as a school, has always carried with it certain top-down notions (i.e., the increasingly popular and derogatory "You got schooled"). A school, typically, exposes all students to a pre-defined set of experiences and information, while an education is a unique result of the personal reaction to those experiences and information.

As spring break draws to a close and the school year gears up for its final thrust, we have been thinking a lot about the role that social networks can play in "21st Century Learning". In the course of our research, second generation terms like "Web 2.0", "School 2.0" and "Classroom 2.0" have cropped up time and time again. Here are three good links that provide some interesting points on the whole idea:

David Warlick, "I'm getting Diigo"

Working Toward Excellence, "A Glossary of Classroom 2.0 Terms"

Now Is Gone, "The Four C's of Social Engagement"

We would agree with Warlick that the future of the textbook ought to be as some sort of nexus where students could engage with each other over. However, we would extend this idea a little farther, as we personally question the need for a textbook at all. In our opinion, Warlick's key idea is that students engage around the course content, which is usually contained within the textbook. The user experience within a social network, gives emphasis on personal choice to direct, and help co-create experiences, something more in line with Mark Twain's take on schooling and education mentioned above. The article, "The Four C's of Social Engagement" describes some fairly typical ways that businesses and marketing agencies are using social networks, and the question that we find ourselves asking is, what is stopping us as educators from doing the same thing?

Shifting Cultural Touchstones?

2008-02-26T09:24:00.000-08:00

It would be very interesting to us here at Exploding Beakers to try an unearth commentaries from those who lived through the last major media shift - that is people who were around for the shift from an oral culture to a print culture. Did they moan and groan about how "those kids today with their books just don't understand the workings of Druidic culture like they used to? Why can't anyone recite Homer anymore?" By the very nature of the shift in medium, comments of the champions of the old guard are very hard to find nowadays. How many of us would be able to "read" the impassioned defense of the BetaMAX format its users probably made and recorded- on BetaMAX?

There is a story here, from USAToday about the general disconnectedness teenagers exhibit from their cultural antecedents. As an aside, we are intrigued by the timing of this discovery, as we were shocked by one of the questions directed to OSCAR-winning actress Marie Cotillard, while on the red carpet. The (very) young American journalist asked Cotillard, who later that evening won Best Actress for her portrayl of famed French singer Edith Piaf, that (and we're paraphrasing) since she [Piaf] had died before you [Cotillard] were born, did you know anything about her before beginning the film? However, this is also the central issue raised by the author of the article - that American youth are starting to live more and more in a cultural vaccuum, where the only history they are exposed to is in school history curricula.

In light of some of our earlier posts about the shift we are currently experiencing away from print and towards visual mediums like television and the movies, it would interest us greatly to see how these same students would have fared on subjects that are equally represented in both print and visual cultures. Much has been written about what was gained and lost in the change from an oral to print culture (primarily by authors like Marshall McLuhan), but it remains to be seen how the current process will unfold.

Stealing Ideas

2008-02-24T10:38:00.000-08:00

If you talk to us long enough, or hang around long enough, eventually you'll realize that one of the things we are prone to doing is stealing ideas from one context and applying them in another. Today is no exception.

A few moments ago, our friends at The Daily Wenzel, posted a comment and article on the nature of criticism, made within the context of computer gaming. However, within that posted article was a link to another article on how to analyze computer games from a game designers' perspective.

What we found inspiring was the brief discussion on pacing and interest (page 3). We have long been fascinated with the way games such as World of Warcraft or even MySims contain segments of the game designed solely to instruct players in how to play the game. We've argued that teachers need to explore this more in terms of creating more student-centred classroom activities with a greater degree of independence. Furthermore, the way that these games give their players the illusion of unlimited choice (go anywhere, do anything), but actually constrain them to a few options based on prior accomplishments is again something teachers can learn from.

Thus, James Portnow's simple act of describing the methodical rising and falling action of pacing and interest in games offers a similar discussion point. As Portnow suggests, the pace and interest is design to climb steadily over the length of a game. A game is broken down into levels, and a graph of the pace and interest would be mirrored for levels as well, with a peak just before the conclusion. Overall, as each level gets harder, the graph would steadily advance higher.

Imagine you are planning your course for the year: how do you take into account the pacing and interest for your students. Typically we find it easy to imagine that for science classes, the pacing and interest graphs would be relatively flat, day in and day out, punctuated only by the occassional lab, and rising with the advent of the unit exam.

What we would like to propose is something that follows more a levelled game approach. Students are informed at the beginning of the year of some kind of problem to investigate or solve, that would combine elements of all of the various units that make of the course. Then, within each unit, students would engage in a variety of problem-solving activities that could ultimately be applied to their year-end problem. These activities could provide the near-end interest spike that Portnow says game levels should have - what we do feel is certain though, is that this spike should not (and could argue could not) come from a unit end exam.

More on unsupervised spaces

2008-02-18T06:53:00.000-08:00

This is a follow-up to yesterday, as we didn't think we explained as much as we could have.

Students, especially high school students (who we have the most experience with), are very experienced and literate in the educational process, even if they rarely articulate it. However, by the time they reach high school, they understand a lot of the unspoken expectations and rules. for example, when students in a science class are instructed to follow a lab exercise in a textbook or set of worksheets, their expectations about the nature of school fall in place as such:

1. A teacher is not allowed to engage in any activity that could deliberately hurt me. All activities must be "safe".
2. An activity or lab would not appear in a textbook if it didn't work.
3. A teacher would not waste time choosing an activity to do if it didn't work.
4. If I follow the instructions, the lab will work.

These beliefs often operate to shortcut any critical thinking a student does as to whether or not the lab has actually worked. Time and again, we have seen students use the wrong material, or miss a step in the instructions, and therefore unknowingly contravening #4, but still expecting the result they achieved to be consisted with the one expected. In a way, this is similar to the teacher's presence on the playground, to whom the students defer for all of their problem solving and conflict resolution tasks. When the teacher outlines a standard problem and proceedure, the students expect the result they achieve to be the standard, regardless of whether it is or not.

When individual student lab groups develop individual lab problems, assumptions #2-4 do not come into play. Furthermore, a teacher who deliberately cultivates an impression of aloofness regarding the students' lab proceedures, can even undermine #1. More importantly is taking advantage of the following student misconceptions:

1. The teacher has a limited set of knowledge relating to scientific principles and experiments, but this set includes all principles and experiments related to the current course.
2. Student creativity is infinite.
3. It is easy for students to come up with problems or investigations not anticipated by their teacher.

Belief in #3 is not universal, in fact a lot of students have trouble with the independence implied in #3, for a variety of reasons. Conversely, a lot of new teachers believe in #3 and are afraid of turning students loose in a lab for fear it will highlight the teacher's shortcomings as per #1. However, while #1 is mostly true, #2 and #3 are conditioned heavily by student experience - hence the importance of talking to students about what they have done in past courses with different teachers. We have found that when given the chance to develop their own problems, independently of each other, most student groups come up with a range of only three or four problems, owing to the fact that they have a limited range of related experience to draw upon, and in most cases these problems a fairly predictable by the teacher. However, because the students have developed them on their own, their belief that the teacher can help them solve their problem is greatly diminished, increasing the need for them to engage in their own critical thinking.

All Work and No Play?

2008-02-17T20:09:00.000-08:00

Thanks to BBartel, of Exploding Sink fame, who alerted us to this article via Twitter. It deals with the role of play in the development of young people (although it draws primarily on research of young animals). In reading this, we were reminded of an earlier post by our colleagues at The Daily Wenzel concerning a childhood game of theirs called "Murderball". In it, they attempt to highlight the importance (they feel) of unsupervised places for children to occupy and control.

We have always been somewhat sympathetic to this view, and in part, it fits in with some of our own (unresearched) notions of play. The presence of a teacher or parent on a playground or in a room, simultaneously reinforces notions of power (discipline and rules) as well as safety. Part of the point in the Murderball piece was the way in which children use unsupervised places to develop conflict resolution skills and teamwork. Another aspect of these places that intrigues us, is the opportunity it provides for problem-solving.

The article posted above explores a theory that unstructured play is a rehearsal of future skill sets, such as playing house or firefighter. Although some research calls into question play's ability to hone a specific future skill set, many seem to accept that it can enhance a general problem-solving ability (ie. mental agility).

One of our many (again unresearched) theories on student learning is that students are more likely to "learn better" when they find themselves in territory they can believe is unfamiliar and unique to them. While the creation of unsupervised spaces is a legal no-no, situations that minimize the teacher's role whether as safety-provider or rule-enforcer, do much to emphasize this. Just as students are forced to problem solve in unsupervised spaces, lab situations that are not developed by the teacher or textbook but student generated, can help to develop a sense of separation from the teacher, or other student groups if the problems are unique to each student.

Brief Updates

2007-12-19T05:58:00.001-08:00

Two interesting articles came out of eSchool News this week. The first deals with the increasing attention being paid to Green Schools. It's a lengthy article with good examples and tips. The other deals with an attempt to develop more educational video games. It was interesting to see that Global Kids, an online student group (k-12) that was early adopters to the Second Life: Teen Life platform, had helped create one dealing with life in Hiati.

A Quantum Shift

2007-12-18T08:15:00.000-08:00

One of the things that we like about inquiry projects is that it allows students to exert more control over the learning process. When proper amounts of time and guidance are provided, students can pause and reflect on what they have learned, what is relevant to the task at hand, and how best to demonstrate their new-found knowledge. Recently, we have come across to parallel approaches that teachers and students might find rewarding. The first came from documentary film-maker Nikos Theodosakis. The Kelowna-based Theodosakis has been offering workshops to teachers and students on the art of documentary film-making, taking the aspiring film-makers through the process of brainstorming and pitching an idea, to gathering and editing the film. For Theodosakis, the reflection that occurs is as important as the finished film itself, and to us, this process mirrors the same one we would love to see happen in science class - students brainstorm and pitch the investigation, research, experiment, and then present their data. Reflecting on the meaning and relevance of the acquried data/film is just as important as the gathering of the information itself.

Putting this process into a wider context is a recent contest launched by online video provider Quantum Shift TV, entitled "Be the Change! Share the Story". Quantum Shift Tv is loosely based around the YouTube format of social networking for video, but concentrates on "the cultural values of community, care, and interconnectedness" offered by citizen journalism. The school contest focuses on documenting a social or environmental project undertaken by the school. Not only does the project hope to encourage students to commit to some form of local action, but contest videos are then uploaded to the Quantum Shift Tv website, where they can be viewed, ranked, commented on, and linked to, by other contest participants in an effort to create a community geared around social and environmental awareness.

Green Schools

2007-12-13T11:04:00.000-08:00

Sometime ago we waxed rhapsodic about our desire to see more green buildings in Calgary, particularly those that took advantage of schools as potential green (education) sites. A few weeks ago, we were lucky enough to be invited to Cochrane High School to observe some of the of green steps they have taken over the last few years.

Above is the first solar panel array that the school fund-raised for. The panels have been placed on the roof, and it was mentioned that the biggest limit to the number of panels they could place was not cost, but the quality of the roof.

These kinds of roofs were not built to handle large structural loads, and the placing of solar panels, wind turbines, or event "greening" of the roof, will require renovations be made.

Below is the second array the school purchased the following year (at a much lower cost), along with a small wind turbine.

Does Cochrane High School generate enough power for its own electrical needs? No. Currently the power is sufficient for their large gymnasium scoreboard, a laptop that hosts their website and monitors their power consumption (running continuously), with perhaps a small surplus. The real payoff then is in the interest the school has sparked not just among Cochrane students, but throughout the world, as their website will attest. As more and more schools are being constructed with LEEDS and BOMA standards in mind for greening, Cochrane High functions as a first-generation pioneer in this effort.

Science Conference Reflections

2007-12-11T07:10:00.000-08:00

Not exactly a by-the-moment account of last month's Science Teachers' Conference in Edmonton, but the passing of time as allowed for some reflection. The last few posts here at Exploding Beakers has seen us reflect on the change in school cultures - not the plural there as there is a teacher culture and a student culture. We've spent a little bit of bandwidth discussing the disjunction between these two groups. Students, as many commentators, such as Marc Prensky have noted, are moving quickly into an interactive, online culture from a highly stimulating, yet ultimately passive, visual culture (television). Teachers unfortunately, are still straddling the divide between the former knowledge-as-scarce print culture, and a visual one that features knowledge-as-content. Most teachers, especially those featured as regional winners in the Iron Science Competition, are well-attuned to the needs of knowledge-as-content (visual) learners, as were many of the presenters at the Science Teachers' Conference. Unfortunately, these types of learners are a shrinking group, and unfortunately, conference presenters did little to discuss how teachers could better serve the digital demographic.

That learning requires context, is nothing new. In a classroom dominated by a visual culture, knowledge comes as facts embedded within entertaining situations (shows, skits, products), but in the online, interactive, digital environment, where knowledge facts can be recalled artificially on demand, the learning context needs to be an active one with a focus on the application and evaluation of knowledge. Have I recalled the appropriate knowledge? How can I best use this knowledge to complete this task? This is perhaps a difficult conceptual shift to make, but Exploding Beakers is willing to step up and help teachers make it. We will be conference co-organizers for the Calgary 2008 Science Teachers' Conference.

On a more positive note, our favourite conference session came from the teachers at Rundle College, a school for students with learning disabilities, who provided examples and advice on differentiated instruction and assessment in a science classroom. Their assessments were novel in that they respected the learning-style of students, kinestheic learners were encouraged to express their knowledge through physical movement, etc. Was this a perfect for traditional pen and paper midterms and finals? No, as the teachers admitted, it was too early to tell, and definately required far more time management skills. However, student results, as well as confidence and comfort, were quite positive, and the teachers were looking to continue refining their technique.

National Iron Science Teacher Competition (Nov.22)

2007-12-10T05:51:00.000-08:00

The crowd started assembling early here at the staging ground for the National Iron Science Teacher competitive. Exploding Beakers had arrived with the morning light to find a group of volunteer and competitors going through last minute preparations for the annual competition as hundreds of science student all eager to cheer on the best, and most innovative Science teachers across Canada.

At exactly 10:00, the auditorium lights dimmed, the music got noticably louder, as lights the overhead exploded in colored lights and sporks. From a cloud of dry ice, as the Discover Channel hosts emerged to kick short the festivities.

Culled from four regional competitions, the teams from Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, New Brunswick, and the ultimate winners, Unintelligent Design from Manitoba. Highly entertaining, each team provided twelve minute lessons around the theme of "The Body", that could perhaps be said to represent the ideal in a visually-oriented (raised on TV) culture. Many of the teams were able to pack much information into their skits, with one team even adding details about mechanics and levers in their presentation on digestion.

The one thing we would have liked to have seen more of though, was more interaction with the audience along inquiry lines. While most groups organized thier skit around the presentation of a problem, none managed it as a problem to be solved, with the development of a set of criteria for a possible solution, gathering evidence throughout their lesson to be compared against that criteria for evaluation. Only the team from Alberta, with their CSI-inspired presentation came close.

In other related news, Larissa Drozda, from St. Margaret School, was revealed as the Western Canadian winner of the My Science Teacher competition, an online student contest run in conjunction with the Iron Science Teacher festivities.

Social Networking and Teachers

2007-11-27T05:31:00.000-08:00

Social Networking may be one of the biggest internet trends in the last few years, but while students flock to it in droves, it's educational potential still remains questionable and in need of investigation. However, we have been hearing reports of school districts being uncomfortable with their teachers signing up for sites such as MySpace or Facebook, as many places (not just Alberta) have legislation and/or professional codes of conduct that seek to regulate the public behaviour of teachers in and out of school. This article, came to us from Eschoolnews.com, via Twitter and MyLearningSpace, and centres around the problem of social networks allowing for the overlapping of a teacher's public and private behaviour.

Dr. Sharon Friesen

2007-11-26T14:05:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, Dr. Sharon Friesen from the University of Calgary, came to visit the Instructional Services staff and talk about the need for educational reform. Many of Friesen's talking points involved moving the educational system away from the assembly line model that was developed (primarily in the United States) at the turn of the last century. In this model, students are viewed as products that have particular forms of knowledge imprinted (or processed) on them. Quality control measures governing the success of the imprinting, can result in the passing or failing of students. Some of these issues we discussed in an earlier post (The Song Remains the Same), and had even begun exploring in a somewhat abortive wiki-venture, Beware The Octopus. While we enjoyed Dr. Friesen's talk, her's is just one voice in an ever-growing chorus highlighting the need for many multi-faceted changes to our school systems.

Dr. Friesen is also the co-founed of the Galileo Educational Network, an organization that has done some great work in Calgary promoting more inquiry in schools.

Video conferencing

2007-11-01T09:01:00.000-07:00

Today we are takig part in a Regional Lead Network workshop on video conferencing and online desktop sharing (great for having students do collaborative work). Several companies such as Polycom, Webex, and Smart offer different formats and platforms. As with our recent visit to Smart HQ with some Dutch teachers, we are very eager to explore the opportunities this software presents, especially when used in conjunction with interactive whiteboards or student laptops.

The Song Remains The Same

2007-10-30T10:29:00.000-07:00

(or, The Medium Is Still the Message)

The linked video was passed to us earlier today via Twitter, from MyLearningSpace. It is the type of thing that usually crops up in Education and Technology sessions, pointing to the discrepancy between teaching styles and learning styles in the digital age, we recommend viewing it - but if you are familiar with Prensky's Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants, then you are already thinking along the right path.

However, what captured our attention in this video was the opening scene of an empty university lecture hall, with rows upon rows of seats, along with a caption mentioning how are 21st century students are sitting in 19th century institutions. It instantly reminded us of economic theories talking about how changes in modes of productions can bring about changes in social relations. Shouldn't changes in the storage, production, and transfer of knowledge bring about changes in educational relations?

Many writers on educational issues have discussed how the image of the lone authoritative speaker in front of the classroom suggests that the speaker has knowledge and the students do not. What this also supposes however, is that knowledge or information is scarce. It is the speakers' prior acquisition and mastery of information that grants him or her a privileged position. The explosion in information storage, production, and transfer that started with the printing press, radio, telephone, and computer has made information shockingly abundant. Many educational techniques centre around mastery of information retrieval, a skill that as practiced in the 19th century is no longer relevant. Instead, information retrieval for the 21st century needs to focus more on analyzing and judging value or worth.

Students intuitively understand something is wrong with the educational equation when they ask the perennial question "Why Do We Need To Learn This?" The question is likely to be directed not so much as the content, but the task - "Why do I need to learn how to remember this?" since the possession of a textbook, let alone web-enabled cellphone with online search capabilities makes memorization redundant. Instead, students are looking for a way to engage with the content, to explore its uses and relevance.

Many of the educational reform theories that we encounter deal with enhancing our current teaching technique - how to ask better questions, craft better activities, or assess better. What we need though, is not to refine our technique, but to develop a better one that honours a reality in which students have already mastered simple data retrieval.

Inquiry Schools

2007-10-26T10:48:00.000-07:00

A request yesterday for the Inquiry Schools "Water Crossing" video, led us to revisit the Inquiry Schools website, where we discovered several more videos dealing with the Inquiry Process, chiefly one dealing with the topic of energy. Again, what impresses us with the work of Inquiry Schools is how clearly they lay out the Inquiry Process to be used in schools. In our own discussions with teachers we find that, too often, teachers underestimate the amount of time students need to think about the topic initially, and how much open exploration they ought to be allowed to do. Furthermore, these teachers tend to try to constrain the activity to their own class, or to a specific outcome. To us, ideally, Inquiry Projects are cross-curricular, grouped around very broad themes, such as water, energy, transportation, etc., allowing students to find their own area of interest within that. Furthermore, by extending the project across several subject areas, it not only increases the likelihood that students will find an area of interest, but also allows the teacher to increase the instructional time devoted to the early reflection and exploration stages. Rather than trying to shoehorn an introductory episode into a 45 minutes class, piggybacking on another subject class or two enables this precious time to be doubled, or even tripled. Of course, this raises the question of what kind of outcome ought to be expected, as a particular student might be working on the same topic for Social class, as opposed to English class. Any project outcome or rubric therefore needs to be developed in such a manner as it provides for elements common to all involved subjects, but also contains a subset that would respect specific knowledge, skill, or attitude outcomes of individual subjects.

A Friend in the Blogosphere

2007-10-22T15:49:00.000-07:00

When the National Science Teachers' Association announced the release of their Lab Out Loud podcast series, we were naturally enough interested. The series comprises 52 episodes and contain extra notes for more in-depth information, with episode one being a look back at the impact of Sputnik on science education and a look forward at the types of skills necessary in the twent-first century.

More pleased however, was our discovery that one of the series' co-creators, Brian Bartel is running his own blog, www.explodingsink.com. Of course, we love the name, but were even more impressed to find that Bartel's Exploding Sink is very similar in intent to our own Exploding Beakers, though much more polished (hey, we're new!). We particularly loved his description of his "margarine lab" where students find percent of water in margarine, via heated composition. The activity serves as a good precursor to percent composition activities later in chemistry. We also appreciated his comparision of online media services, Discovery Education Streaming, and Safari Montage.

Bridgit

2007-10-18T10:07:00.001-07:00

At Exploding Beakers we have long been fans of students collaborating with other students in different classrooms and schools. We are particularly impressed this morning with a trans-Atlantic project between a school in NewBrunswick and another in the Netherlands using Bridgit software. Try it out for yourselves!

Being SMART

2007-10-18T09:50:00.000-07:00

We are currently spending the day in downtown Calgary at the SMART offices, home to the makers of interactive whiteboards, a rapidly growing classroom technology, as SMART hosts a delegation of teachers from the Netherlands who have partnered up with teachers from the Calgary Catholic School District.

The teachers have spent the last few days visiting schools and sharing thoughts and practices surrounding innovative uses of SMART technologies in the classroom.

Check back soon for some more in-depth information.

Wired Science Updates

2007-10-11T12:19:00.000-07:00

Exploding Beakers is pleased to offer Twitter updates for PBS' Wired Science. You can find the updates on our right-hand sidebar. Not only do they give you a different slant on the show, but also link to preview videos. Plus, if you set yourself up an account at Twitter.com, you can sign up to receive your on Wired Science updates on your own webpage or even cellphone!

How To Build A New Science Classroom

2007-10-09T09:29:00.001-07:00

A lot of new schools have been built lately, and even more are getting (slowly) renovated. Every so often we are asked for some input on how to make a good (usually meaning safe) science classroom. Such a talk always involves looking issues of best practice, latest technology, as well as fire and building codes. The National Science Teacher Association has recently released their own take on the endeavour, and The NSTA Guide to Planning School Science Facilities is a welcomed perspective.

Global Warming 101

2007-10-01T14:39:00.000-07:00

The Global Warming 101 Artic Expedition was one of the initial inspirations for Exploding Beakers. Granted the Global Warming 101 website is much more detailed and comprehensive than a blog like ours, it was their steady updating of information about the Artic Circle that they gathered and posted routinely throughout their May-August trek that we found fascinating. You could come back to the site every couple of days and find something new, whether it was pictures, podcasts, or short interviews with the locals describing how the changing weather patterns were changing traditional living practices.

We encourage you to check out their website and ongoing activities.

LearnAlberta Online Gizmos

2007-10-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

Like our students, we love to play, especially online. Sometimes, it's pretty amazing what you'll spend your time doing if it has a certain element of "fun" to it. For example, LearnAlberta has just announced several online interactive demos and assessment applets for Jr. High Science. Each grade level as about two units of study completed so far, each with ten or so "gizmos". Access to the LearnAlberta site is free to Calgary Catholic teachers so check out some of the applets, and use them in class the net time you have a SMARTboard or LCD projector handy.

We like the fact that the online assessment tools offer immediate marking and feedback, so students can tell right away how they're doing.

Science Cafe

2007-09-24T06:13:00.000-07:00

Science, like teaching and education, is a cultural activity, but too often we tend not to think of it as such. The common image is one of a scientists, or team of scientists, at work in a lab. But cultural activities come in all shapes and sizes and so we are pleased to announce the upcoming Science Cafe session scheduled for Tuesday, September 25 at the Unicorn pub, downtown on eigthth avenue.

Sponsored by the Telus World of Science and the University of Calgary, Science Cafes will be taking place on the fourth Tuesday of every month. This month features "The Perfect Storm: Animals and Humans" with Dr. David Hart from the Faculty of Medicine and Dr. Maurice Maloney, the chief scientific officer of SemBioSys Genetics, Inc. - for a further schedule and more information, click on the Telus World of Science Link.

Environmental Schools

2007-09-12T08:52:00.000-07:00

As much discussion as the talk about greening schools is getting, one of the ideas that rarely gets mentioned, is the idea of the rooftop garden, or "green roof". We first came across the idea in Germany and Italy a decade ago while travelling, and while we thought it was a neat idea, promptly forgot about it until we visited one of the newer schools in southeast Calgary. A large, multi-levelled building, it has a second floor meeting space that overlooks a flat first floor roof and the a small grove of trees on the lawn beyond. It did not tak much imagination to picture a door leading out to a rooftop garden to provide staff with a place to visit in the warm summer months.

Sadly it seems, even the CBC ran a story last week on the slowly growing trend for rooftop gardens, it appears that such a thing will remain years away. If school districts are struggling financially to maintian their existing infrastructure, the added expense of a rooftop garden looks to be an unattainable luxury.

Bring On The Iron Science Teachers!

2007-09-11T08:44:00.000-07:00

Last year the Alberta Ingenuity Fund sponsored a province-wide competition for science teachers based on the popular TV cooking game show Iron Chef. Teams of science teachers battled it out in Edmonton's Science Stadium, designing highly creative lesson plans around the theme of colour. Calgary's very own (and good friends of ours) Iron Maidens, rocked the competition, taking home top honours. This year, the contest is going national and Calgary is hosting on of the regional Teach-Offs (if that's what they're calling them!).

Exploding Beakers will be looking to cover all the action, so stay tuned!

Updated links

2007-09-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

The archived links section (hosted on the wetpaint site) has been updated with over two dozen links (not including the ones posted here). Click on over to check them out!

A spirit of exploration!

2007-09-08T19:58:00.000-07:00

What is the spirit of science class? Matt Cho, also a Father Lacombe grad but now a current Carleton mechanical engineering student, offers this opinion:

"Science, whether it is Chemistry, Biology or Physics, it is fun to learn. The fun comes from the experiences in class. Chemistry is fun because you are able to mix chemicals (under supervision of course) and watch a nice change of color, watch something form or even get a small explosion (though that rarely ever happens).

In biology, which I have never taken myself, is fun as a lot of people say. You have a chance to dissect parts of animals or even whole animals, learn about how things work in your body and be amazed at how much something inside your body can do or maybe even shine a bright light on insects and see how their behaviours change.

Physics, though it is mostly math, may sometimes be fun. You get to see how fast and how far u can shoot something, find out how much fore Superman needs to use to stop a train moving at a certain speed or, if you’re lucky enough, u might get to watch your teacher swing a bucket of water all the way around, then miscalculating how much velocity is needed for the water to stay in the bucket as it is at the top of the swing and gets water dumped all over him or her.

Science is not as boring as many people think, working hard and studying hard and you might just get rewarded with doing some fun labs and experiments."

Teaching About Climate Change

2007-09-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

Climate change.

It seems everyone these days has an opinion or an interest in the matter. It's even the question of whether climate change is a debatable subject seems like an object of debate. The questions are not simply, is it happening or not, but do the scientists even agree, and these often detract from the overriding question of what are we to do?

As science teachers, the question "what are we to do" resonates in a different way altogether. The topic of climate change crops up in the K-12 curriculum at different places, and many teachers, wanting to be mindful of the many different public perspectives, are unsure of how far they can go in their teaching of climate change concepts.

Perhaps in recognition of just how much has changed since even the introduction of the new Science 10 curriculum in 2003, the Alberta Government, in conjunction with the Lethbridge Environment Week Committee, has developed Climate Change: Creating Solutions for Our Future to assist teachers in the matter. The document not only provides teachers and students with resources of study, but also creates the groundwork for a consistent dialogue across the province. To download the document, click here.

And they're off!

2007-09-04T08:52:00.000-07:00

Thousands of students marched back to class today, and it seems we are not the only ones excited by the start of the new school year. Exploding Beakers asked current University of Calgary student John MacDonald (Father Lacombe, Class of 2006) to reflect back on his high school days:

"One of my favorite moments in high school physics was when my teacher demonstrated what most would call a “hoot” tube. It is basically a tube which you hold overtop of a bunsen burner and a resonant frequency (which corresponds to a wavelength of half the length of the tube) is the result. This experiment peaked my interest into the properties of sound, how it is made and how it propagates through various mediums. This interest later lead to an exploration into the properties of sound absorption in a research paper I wrote in grade twelve. I went to the university in search of information, conducted some laboratory experiments that I came up with myself and came to a solid conclusion about sound absorption in regards to materials used, shape and even how these materials react at various frequencies. It is amazing how a small classroom demonstration can invoke so much interest, that it allowed me to go beyond the scope of the curriculum to discover other aspects of science outside the classroom."

Water - An Inquiry Approach

2007-08-31T12:25:00.000-07:00

People often ask us what we mean when we talk about an "inquiry approach" to science learning, and we recently came across this teacher developed video from Australia that does a wonderful job at demonstrating how such a project could be done. That she manages to incorporate some cool technology like Skype to talk to other schools around the world, makes it even cooler.

To download the video, entittled "Water Crossing", click here.

Google Sky

2007-08-30T08:34:00.000-07:00

One of the nice things about being here at Exploding Beakers is that when new technology gets released (or even old ones dusted off), it's part of our "job" to play around with it. It's not just kindergarten teachers that subscribe to the "Learn Through Play" philosophy -we do too, and it's something we encourage all science teachers to explore.

So over the next few days we will be playing around with Google Sky, the latest addition to Google Earth, a free download we've been a fan of for some time. Now, users can turn the power Google program into the night sky and use it to view images of interstellar objects. Currently, we've been using Stellarium for our astronomy focused units in grades six, seven, and nine, as well as high school physics.

You can check out both of these programs through the sidebar download link.

Setting up the podcasts

2007-08-29T10:01:00.001-07:00

As we are still in the early stages of collecting resources, we have tentatively begun posting links to various science podcasts. In a few weeks we hope to edit this down into something more manageable.

Please let us know about resources you'd like to see here.

Let the Photons Fly!

2007-08-28T12:55:00.000-07:00

As we enter the final week of August, teachers and students are preparing themselves for the beginning of a new school, we here at Exploding Beakers can feel the hum and electricty, like ozone at a power plant. We are excited to bring science teachers the latest in news about science education, as well as spotlighting new technology and classroom activities!

So, hello and best wishes to you all!

Welcome!

2007-08-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

This site is meant to be an online repository for assorted links and resources for Jr. High and High School Science teachers.