Survival of the Twittest

https://twitter.com/steveweatherell/status/782484974352080897

When talking about Twitter, there's only just enough vocabulary to write a nonsensical haiku. Knowing the lingo can get you on the first rung of the ladder. Yet not everyone gets it. I wanted to find out why.

I confess... I don't do Twitter very well. I mostly lurk; when I post, the ripples are negligible; I overthink retweeting. My total number of Tweets is in between my Follower and Following counts. My Likes broke single figures, but most of them are probably me. And I've got zero Moments (I don't even know what that is). Imagine what it would be like to have a K in one of those numbers!

But I do get it. I think I know why others love Twitter and why my work would benefit if I could fit it into my life. This week, I have been reading a lot of the good advice around, looking for the specific pieces which will help me to move up a level.

routine

"You've got to make some time to use it" (Ted Cowan @tedcowan7 quoted in Twitter: A Cultural Guidebook by Raisdana @intrepidteacher and Beasley @klbeasley).

"I skim through posts for 20 minutes each morning and afternoon." (Ferriter @plugusin in Why Teachers Should Try Twitter)

Whenever you try to fit a new activity into your busy life, something else has got to give. Let's make sure it's not sleep that gives, but even brief and immediate Twitter won't work for you if you don't give it the time. I will have to be deliberate and build it into my routine.

"Monitor the most popular hours for your Twitter followers, then concentrate your most important messages in those hours for more effective tweeting." (The Teacher's Guide to Twitter)

No. Life's too short.

patience

"Be patient, and you’ll build a group of valuable followers." (Teacher's Guide to Twitter)

"The trick is to keep putting it out there" (Louise Phinney @louisephinney in Twitter Cultural Guidebook)

https://twitter.com/steveweatherell/status/782500144335974400

curation

"I have easy access to a stream of customized information and ideas that motivate me" (Ferriter)

"Check out the follow lists of people you find interesting and connect with them." (Teacher's Guide to Twitter)

https://twitter.com/steveweatherell/status/782504199405858816

There's no excuse for a boring Twitter feed, but it doesn't happen by itself. I have been learning from other users' tricks. Interesting people follow other interesting people. Hashtags, chats, trending topics, events, lists are all places to go to find a greater concentration of quality which you can divert into your own stream.

But I follow fewer people on Twitter than I have Facebook friends and that seems the wrong way around. Twitter is not even mutual; you are unlimited in what you can choose to let in. The famous Couros brothers, followed by a quarter of a million Twitter users, also follow between them more than 100 000. They seem to me to have a more sophisticated understanding of the meaning of Twitter.

production

"(As a lurker,) you still aren't sure what is worth sharing and you filter yourself often" (Raisdana and Beasley)

"The real magic happens when you share, too." (Teacher's Guide to Twitter)

Everyone has their own Twitter landscape. Lurking is an option and if I hadn't, I would not have discovered Jing at a very early stage, nor some really great lesson ideas which I now use frequently. Others only ever seem to retweet lists. Who are we though to criticise someone else'e Twitter? But there is a distinction between the consumer and the producer and that is the line I feel I should force myself to cross. One of the beauties of Twitter is its restrictions and learning to express myself and to attract attention is a new challenge.

understanding

Technology is understood largely by metaphor. Most of its language is appropriated from other walks of life (amazingly, a lot of it pre-Gutenburg: scroll, tablet, stylus, file etc). Understanding Twitter also requires some good analogies.

"You have to view Twitter as a river. Whether you’re in it or not, the river is going by. When I have a chance to go dip my toe in, I catch a few big fish. I don’t need to know what I missed." (Patrick Green @pgreensoup in Raisdana and Beasley).

This metaphor has long appealed to me. You only see a small amount of the huge stream that flows by, but so long as you trust that it will continue and that the interesting voices will be amplified so that a great tweet you missed may well be retweeted, there is no stress in the times when you are not busy with Twitter.

But the Twitter river image also has its limits, because the feed is not just linear, (as Manuel Lima says about trees) it is also a network with links along more dimensions than just the arrow of time. What strengthens these links is the power of an idea, what Richard Dawkins called memes. By appealing to other users, everyone's ideas, including your own, are subject to a version of Darwin's Dangerous Idea: The Survival of the Twittest.

You call this 21st Century?

"Let's not just adopt technology into our schools. Let's adapt it, push it, pull it, iterate with it, experiment with it, test it, and redo it".

Marc Prensky's call to arms demonstrates how he foresaw (in 2005) that we would struggle to change our teaching to do justice to the astonishing promise of new technology. In the school where I work, we have overcome Prensky's "Big Tech Barrier" - we have gone one-to-one. But this is not the time to pat ourselves on the back: "machines are the easy part" said Doug Johnson in 2004 in the most practical book I have read about technology in schools (free download at the link).

After several years, I have returned to teaching Theory of Knowledge (ToK) because I love to do it and, as Ed Tech Coach, I want to have current experience of the challenges of the classroom. ToK is a central component of the IB Diploma and according to its aims, "encourages students to formulate answers to the question “how do you know?” in a variety of contexts". (Subject Guide). These contexts include the points of view of different cultures. The course is expressed largely in the form of open-ended questions rather than definitive statements about what students should know. For example:

"To what extent are our familiar areas of knowledge embedded in a particular tradition or to what extent might they be bound to a particular culture?"

Very few courses in Western education have ever been formulated entirely in questions. The others which have done so provided a description of the expected pedagogy. ToK teachers are free from even this constraint. What an opportunity to experiment!

So in my introductory unit, having looked at the variety of perspectives we each have, I want the students to consider how cultures affect the ways people see the world. Moving beyond ethnic cultures, I also want to consider those which arise within a society. That's the first element of my lesson.

What I do not want is a lesson in which I provide most of the information, nor do I want an unbounded discussion which would probably engage a few and silence the many (particularly since it is not the default setting for we Physics teachers).

“Engagement and motivation are products of learning about things that matter to kids, things that they see value in" (Will Richardson quoted in Wywrot)

[caption id="attachment_47" align="alignright" width="359"] The deadline looms[/caption]

"Relevance and agency over learning" are the solutions, says Richardson, and "creative assignments". So that's the second and third elements. Next was the timely publication in the Guardian of the documentary Gun Nation. The phrase 'gun culture' came to my mind and I thought I had found the stimulus for my lesson. I realised simultaneously that I could build some activities around the video using TED Ed which is a powerful tool I have been wanting to use with students for some time. Furthermore, in Week 1 of CoETaIL I had looked at the Rubrics for Bloom's Digital Taxonomy on Andrew Churches' Educational Origami wiki. For the creative assignment I have in mind, Andrew's Digital Publishing rubric fits my bill, but it needed a degree of adaptation to become my own Digital Document rubric (with grateful attribution).

If you've been keeping count, that's six elements, to which I'll add one more:

1. Cultural perspectives in the ToK course;


2. Relevance and student agency;


3. Creative assignments;


4. Gun Nation documentary as a stimulus;


5. TED Ed as a medium;


6. Digital rubric;


7. Our One to World learning environment.

Take seven elements and react to form the Is it a culture? activity

We are in the middle of the activity right now, so evaluation would be premature. But to return to the wisdom of Doug Johnson, Never Assume.



 

 

The day I learned...

[caption id="attachment_33" align="alignright" width="321"] An example of an analogue medium[/caption]

One of my most memorable learning experiences happened during the year I worked as a journalist on a radical newspaper. I had reported in a few boring and literal sentences a city council meeting at which subsidies for kids’ clothing were cut. The kindly editor added a preliminary sentence: “Conservative Councillors would rather see children in rags than help striking miners”. Since that day, I have approached writing differently and purposefully wielded a blue pencil when students have submitted lacklustre opening sentences.

"What are the moments in your PK-12 education that were transformative, or had the most lasting impact on you?"

This question, posed by Alex Hernandez, was what took me back to my reporting days. He calls them 'signature learning experiences' and wonders: "what might a school look like if it were comprised largely of signature experiences?". My understanding of the exceptional nature of SLEs suggests that it is not an attainable goal.

But it resonates with a belief about education I have which sets the bar a little lower. My idea seems too simple to call a philosophy or theory. It is this: We learn when the experience is memorable. I can picture the time the construction of the Arabic word for 'library' was explained to me; Salvador Dali's obsession with ants; how James Clerk Maxwell derived the speed of light; an elusive chord in an Iggy Pop song. Each time, there was a sense of joy at making connections which has been transmitted to the present day.

[caption id="attachment_38" align="aligncenter" width="420"] Four things I'll never forget.Sources: ants, wave, iggy[/caption]

 

As I say, this seems a very simple thing, almost tautological: you learn when you remember the experience. In this view, it is not the 'knowledge' which is memorable, but the process of acquiring it. Crucially, we are talking about an interaction between people. So the experience is subjective and occurs within the mind of the learner inspired by the teacher (a teacher in the broadest sense: in one of my examples it was a good friend; in another, a YouTuber). And we cannot define what types of lesson will spark the tinder; any experience: an inquiry-based project; a skilfully scaffolded explanation; a telling mnemonic might do the job.

So my job as a teacher is to organise my students' learning experiences so that they are most likely to remember them. This is more than 'making learning fun' or 'easy', rather it is about interest, engagement, relevance, challenge. It can even be "painful" (Thomas and Brown). Making it memorable is what I think we should do. How is the next question, but this post would become too long.

[caption id="attachment_40" align="alignright" width="201"] Can't wait to read this[/caption]

In A New Culture of Learning, Thomas and Brown suggest that traditional schools "are ill equipped to deal with a world of constant change" and "treat education like a machine". The 'New Culture' can be seen as "a one room school house that scales to a global world with an almost unlimited set of resources". They recognise, however, that "the roots of modern education in the West have their start in the Socratic method, which was all about questions and seldom about answers". So it's not that we must do new things we've never done before. We already know what good learning looks like, because everyone recognises the feeling of revelation when it happens to them. But we seem to lose sight of that knowledge very easily when the grading tail wags the learning dog.

In addition to the traditional utensils of the classroom such as discussion, explanation and demonstration, I now also have technology in my arsenal. The question I frequently address these days is: How can technology, along with everything else, assist me in making the learning experience memorable? I am not short of opportunities, since:

“there are many ideas and topics that have always been important but were left out of traditional school curricula because they were too difficult to teach and learn with only paper, pencil, books, and blackboard. Some of these ideas are now accessible through creative use of new digital technologies.” (Resnick in Krueger).

[caption id="attachment_39" align="alignleft" width="200"] That moment when it sticks[/caption]

Using the old media of typewriters and notepads, I learned an important lesson about engaging an audience. Now, composing on a blogging platform, I have many more means at my disposal to make the message more compelling.

Surely it should be the same in the classroom.

 

Taxonomy Domine

When I went for breakfast at the ISTE conference one day last June, I picked up more than just muffins and coffee. ISTE's best-kept secret was finally out: the 2016 Standards for Students in handy poster format. I tweeted them out.

— Steve Weatherell (@steveweatherell) June 27, 2016

So was it worth the wait? After 9 years, ISTE has given the Standards a big shake-up. Firstly, the bar has been set higher, and no longer do we merely "use technology to learn". No, we are promoting "Transformative learning with technology".



And it's true! The new Standards are very far-reaching, including whole new skills and abilities which we expect good teaching to bring to our students. For example, there is a new category: Computational Thinking. Of course, it could all just be wishful thinking. Just saying something is transformative, does not make it so. But as I plot my path through CoETaIL Course 1, I feel that the new Standards (a taxonomy, if you will) are very timely.

[caption id="attachment_26" align="alignleft" width="213"] Bloom's Taxonomy updated 1990[/caption]

 

This week I became re-acquainted, once again, with the work of Dr Benjamin Bloom who pops up whenever I am studying education.

The most interesting aspect of the 1990 revision of Bloom's taxonomy is how Synthesis is promoted and re-branded. It becomes Creating. Whereas 'synthesis' suggests a use of raw materials to make a new product, 'creation' implies an extra ingredient - something which wasn't there before. Perhaps the difference is only semantic, but the decision to put Creating at the top of the ladder is significant.

Few people in 1990 could have foreseen how, within a couple of decades, it would be commonplace to be able to create artifacts: films; sound recordings; multimedia objects using one and the same portable machine. But Bloom's revised taxonomy anticipated the changes in education which ubiquitous digital technology makes possible.

 

[caption id="attachment_28" align="alignright" width="160"] 3 steps to heaven[/caption]

I read about another hierarchical taxonomy in Living and Learning with New Media. According to this analysis, kids, on their own and without the help of adults, hang out with technology, then mess around and finally geek out. It's a hopeful vision, but the reality about the geek stage which is "intense, autonomous, and interest-driven" (p. 28), is that:

"these kinds of youths are a small minority among those we encountered" (p. 28)

That is not a startling revelation to many of us who work with 21st century youth. Although some of my students are much more skillful and dexterous than me in their daily use of their devices, in other ways they are limited in what they do. They have acquired certain habits such as efficiently consuming and generating social media, but they do not necessarily learn new skills unless they offer immediate rewards (why would they?). This innate conservatism is invisible to many of my colleagues who regard their students as masters of the new devices, but it is important for the teachers to realise that it is so.

For otherwise, what would we need teachers for? Thankfully, search engines have taken over some of the bottom-rung Bloom skills. And there are web-services which allow anyone to cobble together a basic explanatory video. This leaves us with our hands a little freer to give the students new challenges.

[caption id="attachment_29" align="alignleft" width="174"] Image credit: ladder[/caption]

Sure, student, you can bash out a quick presentation, but:

• Do you know how to find and evaluate the most reliable sources?


• Can you use visual information to engage your audience rather than riddle them with bullets?


• Will you present it in a way that your audience understands the ethical or social implications?

Google won't do that for you, but your teacher can.

Last week, in my Theory of Knowledge class, I had a clear idea of what I wanted the students to understand at the end of the lesson and I designed an activity to achieve it. I don't think I did a good job. In attempting to dictate the students' learning, I did not trust in their ability to construct it. We used the devices but as consumers when we could have been creating.

So next time we will climb the ladder.

Me, technology and delayed gratification

[caption id="attachment_23" align="alignleft" width="149"] Image: flippedclassroom.com[/caption]

This week, I considered the idea of Perspectives with my Grade 11 Theory of Knowledge students.

How do our identity and our experiences affect what and how we know things?

The students and I each prepared an online slideshow illustrating the different perspectives we believe we have. I enjoyed the process of thinking about the aspects of me which affect how I see the world. Here are the slides I shared with the students:


I have never been happier in a job than I am now as an educational technology coach. I see myself as an educator, primarily, but one who has learned a lot about the ways in which new developments in technology can enhance the learning experiences of school students. But it was not always that way...

[caption id="attachment_20" align="alignright" width="332"] Matt and Steve. Halos optional[/caption]

My closest colleague last year was a Millennial. We were doing the same work, but in at least one way our backgrounds could not be more different. Matt has spent his first three decades surrounded by computer technology and used the Internet from an early age. By the time I turned thirty, I was yet to own my first computer. In fact I was heard to observe in 1990 that "there is nothing computers can do that people haven't been doing for centuries".

But opportunity, apparently, makes the geek. In 1995 in Thailand, when the international school I joined gave each teacher a Windows desktop, I gradually discovered that every aspect of my work could be enhanced by judicious use of computers (I also learned that Duke Nukem is an endless sink of time). That's not to say computers solve every problem, rather they add a new dimension of possibilities. A year later, a colleague showed me the Internet (of which we had by then heard, even in rural Thailand) and I surfed to the brand new site I'd just read about in the newspaper: davidbowie.com (and for just one example of the surreal power of the technology, step in this time machine).

[caption id="attachment_21" align="alignleft" width="299"] We all have our own perspectives. Image MC Escher[/caption]

My journey in international education has continued, accompanied every step of the way by the amazing power of arguably humankind's greatest invention. I feel fortunate to have seen this happen in my lifetime and to have been able to use it to create and communicate with students and teachers around the world. Like many relationships, mine with technology is coloured by its history; my perspective as a user of technology is mediated by my past interactions with it.

I was prompted to think about my travels with technology when reading Jeff Utecht's reflections in Reach. Jeff describes how following blogs led him to start his own:

"With one simple click of the button, I had created my little piece of the web that would allow me to communicate and collaborate with others who were all passionate about the same thing: learning." (p. II)

In my own way, exposure to educational technology has shown me ways in which traditional education can be enhanced and then transformed by technology. This has made me passionate to share with my colleagues what I have learned. It is never easy, because we are all to some extent trapped in the ingrained perspectives of our own schooling and a lack of insight into what the future holds. I am not one of those people who will tell you 'a revolution is taking place' because I believe we have yet to shed our shackles. The fight is worth it, however.

The IB's Theory of Knowledge is almost unique as a course expressed entirely in questions rather than declarative statements of what students 'should' do. ToK encourages critical thinking and "an appreciation of the diversity and richness of cultural perspectives" according to the IBO website. As a course with an innovative approach, I feel it is the ideal place for me to employ new media to enhance and enrich the experience of learning. And the way I do that will be unavoidably influenced by the way I have grown up with technology.

I look forward greatly to sharing the experience with the CoETaIL community.

 

Collaboration, real collaboration, is hard to do!

Happy collaborators

Collaboration is a word with an unusual history. From the original 'collaborateurs' in the Napoleonic wars who were smugglers assisting the Monarchists; via 'traitorous cooperation with the enemy' (OED) in Vichy France; to our present concept commonly used in education to describe the desirable cooperation between peers. Viewed neutrally, it simply means 'working together' and what's not to like about that?

Ah yes, collaboration! We're a cooperative species, right? Well, like many things in life, real collaboration is easy to say and difficult to do for real. I mean really hard. Like many schools, ours uses that particular C-word a lot. And it's a worthy goal. Most times, when I have listened to the ideas of others and worked them into my plans, the result has been something I wouldn't have achieved on my own. But it can be painful. You mean my idea (which I'm completely in love with) isn't going to work (in your opinion)? I thought we were sorted (with my idea central) - we're going to have to do some more work and throw some stuff away (my stuff)?

Two decades ago, at a young international school, I came up with a fail-safe plan to solve a discipline problem we were experiencing. I wrote a hierarchy of infractions and consequences which only required consistent application by all staff and our problem would be solved. I spent hours working out my idea and presented it to the colleagues. The meeting was very messy. They said it wouldn't work. I suspected resentment and fought back, but I got no support and the discussion evolved into a dismantling of my scheme and the acceptance of a less draconian proposal. It hurt. But it didn't take long for me to be grateful that I was saved from disaster because people cared enough to make me give up my proposal at the cost of a bruised ego.

Fine words butter no parsnips, as they say in England

Collaboration demands denial from both sides. And it requires us to spend time when we feel we could knock out a good solution quicker on our own. I have spent too much time in lovey-dovey meetings agreeing to cooperate. But I have come to realise that talk is the easy part and the warmth we all feel when we agree to collaborate (before we actually do) is a false friend. The hard work is still in the future and everyone is going to have to give up something they cherish. The reward, if we can get through the humbling, is a better solution than either side would have achieved on its own. And that is really worth giving up something for.

Collaborators image: actri.fr

Parsnip image: healtheatingfood.com

The long road to 1 to 1 (stage 5)

Back in 2012 I wrote a post called ICTF? WTF? in which I wondered what I could make of the job of ICT Facilitator. I had never seen anyone do the job, and it's such a new idea in an environment which we have yet to properly comprehend. Not that everyone agrees with me about that; sometimes I have posed that question and have been advised to look no further than the job description (but who wrote it? how long ago? etc).

I have loved doing this job for the last four years and have learned a lot about what works in terms of helping teachers improve their use of technology. But I have also begun to feel that my reactive style is suffering from diminishing returns. I have aimed at the 'willing'; either putting ideas to colleagues, or responding to their requests for help. I have had some success with teachers who took up one of my proposals and ran with them, in particular with colleagues who have begun to develop their own online spaces: wikis, websites and blogs. As time has passed, there have been fewer takers. A variety of factors has brought this about, both within and outside my control.

So I am changing my focus. While I shall continue to help individuals and promote nice ideas to them, I am proposing to spend more time working with curriculum teams starting with the planning stage of their units. I don't know how this will look. We are developing a process in which I hear the teachers talk about their upcoming module and areas they think might be amenable to development. Then I'll come up with some ideas and we'll go back and forth until we all agree. In this way, I hope, the technology projects will be embedded in the fabric of the curriculum. This will certainly benefit the students whose exposure to ed tech will be more uniform (if this works out the way I hope). I am being supported by the administration, and that recognition is very important when we get into difficult discussion.

It may sound easy, but it will require concessions on both sides. We will be collaborating, but that's where the hard work begins. At which point, I feel another post coming on...