New Media Faculty Development Seminar

I was joking with my friend Amy the other night about how much we each must have liked homework when we were in school, because we chose a profession that guaranteed we’d never be without it!  We were talking on the phone instead of meeting for dinner because we both had a stack of papers [...]

This acceptance speech by Michael Giacchino for “Up”, Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score), seems to make a lot of sense in our context of media literacy and allowing children room for creativity with media. Seems like there are infinitely more options available now, and embracing rich media as a creative and educational opportunity is worth encouraging.

Thank you, guys. When I was… I was nine and I asked my dad, “Can I have your movie camera? That old, wind-up 8 millimeter camera that was in your drawer?” And he goes, “Sure, take it.” And I took it and I started making movies with it and I started being as creative as I could, and never once in my life did my parents ever say, “What you’re doing is a waste of time.” Never. And I grew up, I had teachers, I had colleagues, I had people that I worked with all through my life who always told me what you’re doing is not a waste of time. So that was normal to me that it was OK to do that. I know there are kids out there that don’t have that support system so if you’re out there and you’re listening, listen to me: If you want to be creative, get out there and do it. It’s not a waste of time. Do it. OK? Thank you. Thank you.
Michael Giacchino (“Up”), Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)

A shout-out for Gardner, and then my first dialog with a respondent to my blog post!

First off – kudos to Gardner for being the major contributor to a nice little article about technology at Baylor and TSTC in today’s (3/8/10) Waco Tribune-Herald, found here. Great comments, and a superb plug for the Educational Technology Showcase coming up the first week of April. I hope everyone is signing up for a presentation or poster session (here’s the call for proposals). WTG, Gardner!

Here’s a nice little story that begins to illuminate the power of blogging for me. A few weeks ago, I mentioned the lipdub genre, noting in particular the work of Lawrence High School.

A few days later, I received this email:

Hi Tim,
My name is Jeff Kuhr and I’m the film/media teacher at Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Kansas. I just wanted to write and thank you for posting our lip dub of Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America” and for your wonderful description of it. The students, as I’m sure you can guess, worked extremely hard on it and beyond words proud of it–and the response it’s received from across the country. It is because of all this that it makes me sad to have to write and let you know that yesterday our amazing video was horrifically hacked by some students from the other high school here in Lawrence.

Obviously, my students (and myself) were/are devestated–particularly because the video was so joyous and showed a side of high school I think we all want to believe is still possible. Anyway, we had to reupload our video with a new url (meaning, we lost all our comments and views–130,000 before the hack). I’m hoping, I guess, that you can repost the video with the new url, so that at the very least people have an opportunity to see the video (again) and even if it’s just for 31/2 minutes, have a moment of happiness.

Anyway, here’s the new link.

Let’s see if we can’t surpass our original view count…
Thank you, Tim–from all of us.

Jeff Kuhr
Lawrence High School Film/Media Teacher

Oh my gosh!!!! The teacher found my blog and wrote me! WTF??? I’m amazed, and touched. I start to get it – this (blogging, or more generally – public commentary) is read, searched, and noticed. Holy Cow!!!

So I write back:

Jeff –

Thank you very much for writing. I’ve made the change to the URL to point to the proper version. Shame on those who hacked the first one!

I was thrilled to find your video. It was fun and enormously affirming. The skill, cooperation, and joy of making it were all wonderfully evident. I was so glad to see that disparate groups in a high school could come together to do something so creative and positive. Made me smile and cry at the same time.

Thanks to you, I’ve caught the interest of the faculty new media seminar that I’m in. We’re enjoying the meaning of students as creators of content, and the power of social media to spread opportunity for participation to the world. VERY cool stuff!!!

Congratulations to you and the students of Lawrence High School for creating something so wonderful, enjoyable, and meaningful. Keep up the good work! You’re inspiring more people than you know.

Sincerely,
Tim Logan
Assistant Vice President
Electronic Library
Baylor University
Tim_Logan@baylor.edu

P.S. I’ll watch the video multiple times to make sure the hit count gets back up to where it should be!
P.P.S. Here’s the link that I found your video from: http://www.parentdish.com/2010/02/19/lipdub-videos-show-high-schoolers-directorial-chops/

And then receive this in response:

Thanks so much for your kind words and reposting the link. As I said in my note to you, my students are extremely proud of the work they did and I’m sure when I pass on your comments to them, they’ll be extremely pleased–and honored.
Best from Lawrence,
Jeff

Jeff Kuhr
Lawrence High School
Film/Media

How astonishing.

I hope the kids at Lawrence High School continue to get it. They’re already leading the way.

I agree in principle that we who work in education should be able to describe what we intend to do, and that it is important that we find a way to demonstrate to what extent we have met those goals.

But that principle is a principle of almost unimaginable complexity.

Rather than proliferate crude measures of recall or reductive “normed” evaluations of various templated essays, we should think much more deeply and comprehensively about assessment. To do this, we’ll have to start with what it means not only to learn something in the sense of committing it to memory, vital as that is, but also to understand it, to be able to sense and articulate and share the structure of that knowledge as well as the conjectures and dilemmas that surround it and propel it into new areas of inquiry. We need to think about domain transfer, and ask what kind of learning fosters the analogical and metaphorical thinking that leads to conceptual breakthroughs. We need to think about the teacher’s theory of other minds, as well as the students’. We need to master strategies of indirection that empower each other to imagine and perform what Douglas Hofstadter calls “perceptual regrouping,” that trick of the mind that can perform figure-ground reversals, separate sequences into smaller groups to yield new possibilities, and adapt Polya-esque heuristics to apparently novel situations to reveal surprising connections with apparently far-flung domains.

I have colleagues working as hard as they can to answer the need for complexity. I just hope their work can stem the tide of unthinking “learning outcomes assessment” that Jonathan Kozol pillories in Letters to a Young Teacher.

I really, truly do not think that Likert scales or uniform tests or other simplistic measures are up to the task of helping us map or understand this most profound practice we call “education,” by which I take it we mean a deliberate approach to learning, part of which must include learning about one’s own learning. In other words, the deliberate practice of leading another’s cognition into a richer and more effective relationship with itself.

Of empowering and advancing the brain’s self-shaping capabilities.

I don’t have answers, but I do have a deep intuition that we can best think about this kind of complexity by thinking about similar networks of complexity that have emerged in human experience. (Here’s where I wish I’d majored in anthropology.) There are two such networks I think about a lot these days: language, particularly written language, and the Internet. In this podcast, which records a presentation I did over a year ago at an EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative annual meeting at the invitation of my hero, friend, and colleague Chuck Dziuban, I try to think about assessment by thinking about the emergent properties of the World Wide Web. It seems to me very interesting that a big part of Web 2.0 has to do with assessment, evaluation, reviews, and so forth. Is there a way these emergent phenomena could suggest more comprehensive, inclusive, and meaningful modes of assessing learning? I don’t know, but I do think it’s a question worth asking.

Longtime listeners will hear some familiar themes in this podcast, but cast in a different light. The Shakespeare bits develop some ideas I first began to work on in the “Proof That Matters” talk I did for a K-12 Online Conference a few months before I did this talk. All the ideas here need a great deal more development. I do hope, however, that they’re moving in a more answerable direction than most of the assessment talk I’ve encountered during the last few years.

EDIT: Janet Hawkins alerts me to some parallel thoughts:

http://doyle-scienceteach.blogspot.com/2010/03/rttt-antithetical-to-public-education.html
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=4956989639073843954&postID=3538222791054286821

This morning, I am just reflecting on all of the "new connections" made possible by the World Wide Web (and yes, I do feel like an 80-year-old saying that...). I recently watched a documentary called Second Skin which chronicles the life of several individuals who are MMO users (Massively Multiplayer Online games). Most commonly featured in the film are the online games World of Warcraft (WWC) and EverQuest. In this documentary, you see how these MMOs have affected a wide variety of individuals. Some meet their significant other through the online world and fall in love without ever having met (they eventually meet face-to-face, however). Others are dealing with such a strong addiction that they are playing 17 hours a day or more, have lost their jobs, are being evicted, and essentially seeing their lives fall apart due to their addiction to online gaming. So as I watched this film, I was constantly asking myself - can any good come of this?

Some thoughts…

Concerning our reading for this week – “Personal Dynamic Media” by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg – I think the pithiest comment was found in the introduction.
Seymour Papert, from “User Interface: A Personal View”:
“The ability to ‘read’ a medium means you can access materials and tools generated by others. The ability to ‘write’ in a medium means you can generate materials and tools for others. You must have both to be literate.”
Isn’t that the essence of the significance of new media? The fact that those who were formerly only consumers of information and entertainment can now be, and can now be recognized as, creators in their own right. The media now available make every one a writer, director, composer, mash-up artist, designer – for good or for ill. MUCH more profound than the profligate misuse of fonts that made the first iteration of desktop publishing so horrifying. In this case, we’re seeing huge leaps of expression – the exercise of innate creativity.
Computer literacy has been forever transformed from the minimal skill level for standard applications (Please check the box when appropriate mastery of the required skills for word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, and rudimentary web publishing are met.) to media fluency, where ‘reading’ the medium is inexorably tied to the desire and ability to ‘write’ in the medium. Everyone is an author, director, and composer, and the resultant cacaphony is magnificent; perhaps even a few gems might emerge, but more importantly, many more individuals have the capability and freedom to produce something interesting and worthwhile.

Actually, reading Kay’s and Goldberg’s article was a wonderful walk down memory lane. Brought back memories of the mid- to late 80s, when the Macintosh was presenting itself as EXACTLY the creative device that the authors imagined (except for SmallTalk – we had to wait a bit for HyperCard to allow the rest of us to create actual things that made the computer do what we wanted!) Drawing, painting (with patterns! with patterns that WE could design!!!!!), editing, that awful proliferation of fonts, animation, music – I remember each of these well. MacWrite, MacPaint, MacDraw, Illustrator, Finale – we were in creative heaven. And we could print to a LaserWriter! (Moderately interesting note: in the early years of personal computers, the most powerful computer around was the printer; it had a faster processor and much more memory than any computer that was printing to it.) Kay and Goldberg imagined it, and 10 years later, it was reality.

Another historical aside: in about 1985, Apple came out with the first hard disk for the Macintosh. It cost $1,000 for a whopping 10MB of disk storage. Could hold as much data as 12 800K floppy disks (is my math right here?) Currently, I think you can buy a 1TB disk for $100 or so. I think that’s a million-fold reduction in cost per megabyte. Truly amazing.

I ran across this wonderful comment in Richard Lacayo’s review of the “Renoir in the 20th Century” exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Time magazine, March 1, 2010): “Impressionism affected many people in the 19th century in much the way the Internet does now. It both charmed and unnerved them. It brought to painting a novel immediacy, but it also gave back a world that felt weightless and unstable.” (emphasis mine) I can understand that sense of unease – that lack of substantiality that the print medium provides, both literally and historically. In some ways, we have no history, no record of things as they were at a particular moment. As a trivial example, can you PROVE what the Baylor Personnel and Policies Manual said 5 or 10 years ago? I am convinced that I read a stated hierarchy of hiring preferences based on religion: Baptist, evangelical, Protestant, and then as a last resort, Catholicism. Judaism if a special case could be proven. But, I cannot find or prove that such a statement ever existed; there is no evidence extant, as far as I know. There is a great gap in the historical record being created, the Internet Archive and the WayBack machine notwithstanding.

Also amusing from the same review: speaking of Renoir’s late work, the author surmises, “[A] whole line of mildly lubricious babes, from the phosphorescent nymphs in Maxfield Parrish to Tinkerbell and the Playboy bunny, owe something to the old man’s [Renoir's] influential wet dream of classical form.” I think this comment says WAY too much about the author’s pre-adolescent fantasies about Tinkerbell. Vaguely disturbing. Just sayin’.

All in all, good reading.

In Ted Nelson’s essay, “Computer Lib/Dream Machines” he defends the use of computers-as-teachers in his insert “No More Teachers’ Dirty Looks”. While I wholeheartedly agree with him that the American educational school system is severely flawed in that it tends to squelch the joy of learning in students, I don’t think I’m ready to go all the way with him on his conversion to a teacher-less (teacher-free?) classroom.
Nelson’s comments comparing the way we teach subjects (including the very fact that we flatten and divide material into “subjects” at all) to grinding all of our food into finely ground, evenly-sized monotonic pieces of kibble reminds of an article I read a couple of summers ago by Brian Greene that spoke to this same shortcoming. He likened the way we teach scientific facts and data to our children to a music student being taught only the scales – and never being shown the masterpieces that have come from music. I use the Greene article at the beginning of each semester to stimulate discussion from my students on their own past experiences and how we can re-kindle some of the curiosity that has been lost through traditional science education. I reassure my students that if ever they feel I am simply teaching the scales, they are free to stop me and ask for the “big picture”. Else, we are both wasting our time. On that point I do agree with Nelson.
Additionally, I agree with him that computer-assisted instruction (CAI) can – and probably does – often result in more of the same, with the addition of one more medium in our arsenal of “learning” death. Simply using powerpoint does not make for a better presentation of material (and can even lead to the exact opposite). I could give so many examples, but I think we’ve all sat through a 50+ tortuous slideshow – and can relate!
But when Nelson goes so far as to draw a diagram depicting a student realm on the left and a subject realm on the right, with a teacher brick wall in the middle – well that’s where I fell short in my journey alongside him. I do agree (very much so) that teachers can be THE stumbling block to a student’s learning. But I wouldn’t say that is always – or even mostly – the case. In several discussions among colleagues I’ve had the opportunity to compare notes on the best courses they’ve had, and why. Most often the best courses are so designated primarily because of the teacher’s ability to connect on a very human level with that individual, resulting in a deeper caring and understanding of the material by the student. Sometimes, a student needs a fabulous teacher to help him develop a curiosity for something he might otherwise pass over entirely.
While I find Nelson’s idea of education via hyper-media intriguing (I do think that computers can hugely supplement our learning), I just don’t see that coming to fruition with our widespread access to the internet. WWW…wherever you curious minds leads is… now a very real component in our lives. Yet, how many of us find it so compelling that we are now self-learners, bypassing that dreaded classroom environment for our own personalized learning? Although I know of one colleague who has expressed this would be her ideal way to learn (Phyllis Tippit!), I don’t see this as a viable alternative to our admittedly marred current method. In fact, my personal experience has been that students now are even less likely to seek out material because they 1) become overwhelmed with what is reliable and 2) become just as bored reading an online description/movie/image/etc. of a subject as they would sitting in a class with a teacher who was reading aloud the same dry material. As “fun” and impromptu as computers can be in facilitating the curiosity of a user, I just don’t think that computers will ever be able to entirely replace the teacher – at least the really good ones who know when to step out of the way.

I found much that I thought was good in the Nelson essay on Computer Lib, there are some things in the rhetoric that evoke skepticism in me. First, what did I like? I certainly agree with the comment that compute systems need to be simple for the user. Secondly, I agree that it is good to get beyond thinking sequentially. Third, I do think that is good for students to pursue their curious streaks, and that computers can help in this. When did I become skeptical? It was when I read the box on p. 109. “The human mind is born free, but yet everywhere is in chains.” It has been a long time since I have encountered anyone who voiced this Rousseauan perspective. I know people get enthused about the possibilities for the future, but I do not think that utopian thinking is helpful. Every progressive change in history bring new challenges and issues. We should be prepared for these along with the gains we make.

To begin my blog today, I have to share a couple of links that have got me thinking about how education and technology intertwine with one another to create a more revolutionary learning space.

The first is a talk given by Richard Baraniuk on the possibility of open-source learning. [http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_baraniuk_on_open_source_learning.html] In it, he discusses the idea of knowledge being shared across online space and modified to where we can create or "rip" custom-made learning tools, much like we create our own custom-made music mixes.

Perhaps a realization of these ideas is a digital textbook by Macmillan that will allow teachers to create their own custom textbooks by reordering content, adding supplemental materials, write in the margins, etc. [ see http://www.fastcompany.com/1559117/macmillans-new-digital-textbooks-let-profs-reorder-rewrite-and-stick-it-to-rival-academics?partner=homepage_newsletter].

The most intriguing thing about these ideas and concepts is that they make education more affordable and therefore accessible to the masses. In some ways, I think that this creation of more readily accessible knowledge is much like the invention of the printing press was in its day (thanks for bringing this point home, Gardner). Much like there was hesitation about knowledge getting into the hands of so many people and the implications for that, I think there is certain hesistancy about this open source knowledge that is beginning to be created through an online space. The hesitation has less to do with people having access to the knowledge but more about the creative rights of the knowledge and who has access to EDIT the knowledge. I think these are valid concerns that should be addressed by educators and consumers alike.

However, I see the positive in this possibility. As an educator myself, I have seen how the mere limitation of resources has prevented many of my students from gaining access to valuable knowledge. In my time teaching at a community college (versus a private University), I have had students drop my class because their funds to buy the textbook for the course did not come through. I have seen other students go through several loopholes just to get their hands on a book or resource they were dying to read. This makes me sad. Books and knowledge are the very essence of my existence, and I am heartbroken at the thought of anyone who would not have access to it. To me, books are a place to escape and find freedom. Knowledge and new ideas are the very fuel that drive me to do what I do. It's so exciting to think a new thought or engage yourself in a stimulating discussion. I live off of this stuff and for it. So, yes, I am excited by the idea of a world where free knowledge (or at least cheaper knowledge) is shared.

But I do see the pitfalls. Who is getting paid to share this knowledge? Who is allowed to write up these ideas and share with the world? But I must say, to me, it appears that publishers are perhaps the only individuals who may be benefitting from the creation and circulation of texts (and we are hard pressed to say that, I think). I know that I write just to get my ideas out there. I'm never paid for a single journal article or book chapter I write. In fact, I'm dying just to share my thoughts with the world (and praying to the journal gods that I get published)! I think this online space could be a great way to start sharing that knowledge in another format. The peer-reviewed process, however, should never be abolished as it results in such sophisticated, rigorously tested writing. But, I think there is a space for the sharing of knowledge in an online format.

This is a post in which I anxiously await the reply of my readers. I'm curious what others thing. So, tell me!

Well, I've spent the past ten days out of the technological domain. Firmly in the yogic domain and then the philosophy conference domain, which was refreshingly non technological in focus.

Friday, I got back from a yoga retreat with Patricia Walden. It was held at a Benedictine Monastery in Covington, LA. No cell phones, except in a parked car outside during designated hours, no talking between 10 PM and 10 AM. There is internet access in the retreat center, but curiously, all blogspot addresses were blocked. You could still access, Facebook, Word Press, Live Journal and the like, but no blogspot. I sort of missed keeping up with everyone, but truthfully it was not all that hard to take week off of blogging. I did spend some time wondering why the retreat center had bothered to block only one blogging site.

We spent a good bit of time navigating the inner landscape of the mind and I got to thinking about and more palpably experiencing how much technology is a pull away from the inner landscape toward the outer world.

In yoga philosophy, there is the soul, purusha and there is everything else, the material world, prakriti. The soul is eternal and for the time being it resides in the vehicle of our body, the domain of prakriti. The point of yogic practice is the use the body as a means to know the soul as it truly is. Depending on the particular stream of yoga tradition, how one uses the body varies. One may simply regard the body as something to be overcome, to reduce the connection of the soul to the body as much as possible, as Plato would say, on the other end of the spectrum, one might joyfully embrace the body as the means by which we come to know the soul most fully.

Anyway, I started thinking about technology as an ongoing manifestation of the dance of purusa and prakriti. One could see technology as enhancing either side of the dynamic. There is a sense in which technology does allow us to overcome the limitations of body. We can communicate instantly, we don't have to be physically present to communicate with someone. Our words have a broader audience. Indeed, technology provides us with many of the yogic powers enumerated in the third pada of the yoga sutras. However, technology requires that we use our minds in a rather distracting way. The mind orients externally rather than inward toward its source. Beyond that, it encourages a scattered or oscillating consciousness, not single minded consciousness that is necessary to see the soul.

Engagement in the techological domain does not encourage the space of silence necessary to abide with the soul. Indeed, the numerous forums of communication, Twitter, Facebook, blogging, provide nearly infinite opportunity to capture the fluctuations (vrittis) of the mind at any moment. It is not the domain of sustained reflection on what is most real.