Meditation on 21st Century Skills

One of the reasons why teachers should not feel threatened by technology or change is that in the next decade, the skills needed to be literate in the age of social media are still going to draw on traditional literacies and rhetoric. As a matter of fact, one of the weaknesses of "New Media" is the focus on technology at the expense of solid critical thinking skills. There is so much reposting of stories and not enough fact checking and analysis. Many education blogs will repost stories from sources that are not credible and pass them along as "fact." (Take, for instance, stories about teaching and learning in virtual worlds posted by those who have little experience in the topic.)

I believe that the three modalities of learning will center around critical thinking, networking, and new media. In other words, students will have to be able to analyze information, connect with others, and then use technology to publish their results or express themselves. This has been true since the invention of writing.

I am looking for more feedback on these 21st Century Literacies. There is a lot of talk about the need and not enough on what they are and why. Please feel free to contribute to this conversation using the comment feature of this blog.

Frontline: Digital Nation

I watched Frontline's Digital Nation on television last night. I didn't watch it on the computer because I wanted to give it my full attention while I checked my email, sent notes to Twitter, updated my blog, Facebook, MySpace page and played Phosphor.Wait, what was I watching again?

In all I thought the program was fairly well balanced. Our culture is shifting. It has not evolved. If the digital world has caused us to evolve, why do I still have faculty who need to print out pages from an online learning management system? Why are we still using an LMS? Evolution is where humans begin to develop stouter, stronger, faster thumbs because those who master rapid texting will be the ones who reproduce, but I digress.

I love the scenes where kids who are "internet addicts" are sitting right there on the computer playing games while the mother complains (she is standing right next to him) that the kids grades are down, he is on the computer 12 hours a day, he doesn't eat right, and is becoming more and more antisocial and it us supposedly his problem. The real problem is that people do not know how to raise their children. My dad never negotiated or bargained with me. I can't tell you how many times I have seen mothers and fathers say "wouldn't you like to eat dinner now?" when what they should say is "Its time for dinner." That is the real cultural shift; parents as "pals." Teaching responsibility begins in the home. They can learn about democracy in civics class.

I feel the same way about Sherri Turkle and others when they say that "the kids do themselves a great disservice" by letting them be distracted from lectures. We are teaching children learning skills that are no longer relevant. There are so many ways to harness technology in the classroom that I find it incredible that teachers at MIT are still harnessed to the lecture method. What about using their cell phones as part of a student response system? Have the "google jockeys" in the class put notes and links up on a wiki (yes, MIT, I am available as a consultant for curriculum design). There were some good examples in the documentary of people using technology to turn poorly performing schools around. Not that the technology was the answer; it was the attention to the students that really made the difference. Technology was the medium.

The tests that show that multitaskers are poor performers only prove that tasks that merely require linear analysis are no longer the most effective use of a exo-networked brain.

Writing with Technology

Image by churl via Flickr

Usually my life as a writer and my life as an instructional designer do not intersect much. I did begin life as a tutor and English teacher though. There has always been an element of technology involved with writing (reed stylus anyone?). My latest foray back into the world of novel writing has me thinking and rethinking what I need in a word processor.

My past writing process was to write long-hand in notebooks, type up a draft on a typewriter, annotate and mark up that draft, type up another draft, maybe do some very literal cutting and pasting, and then type up a final draft. This would then be read, annotated and corrected by Jacqui who might even be tempted now and again to retype short pieces for me. I could not have gotten out of community college without her.

I got my BA in English at Sonoma State in 1991. They had Mac labs and I had a couple (only a couple) of instructors who insisted on getting their papers back to them on floppy disk. One of the instructors commented electronically on the papers. I wasn't sure about this technology but my uncle Ed (who also wrote) said to me that what the chain saw was to logging, the word processor was to words. I always started in notebooks. I still have boxes of them.

I still carry a notebook and pen but it is more to shock my brain out of ruts, brainstorming, concept maps, outlines and, of course, just to sit and process thoughts. The odd poem gets pulled out of there but it is mostly for notes and keeping my brain in order. It is more a part of my thinking process than my composing process now.

In November, I took on the insane task of the National Novel Writing Month "contest." The goal is 50,000 words in 30 days. I wrote the whole draft in Google Docs, Google Notes, and Delicious Bookmarks. It was insane because I am still settling into a new job at College of the Redwoods with a really hectic schedule, but of the many justifications, it was a good opportunity to give some online word processors a good shake-down cruise with a big project. I liked being able to write anywhere. I liked being able to share my draft with Jacqui. I will use Google Docs to share the first draft with a couple of volunteer readers and editors. I wish there were a way to join the docs, notes, and bookmarks though - maybe my next novel will be written in Google Wave.

I looked at Zoho Writer which is a great contender with Google Docs. Both of them allow the writer to build a table of contents and insert anchors into the document. This allows you to navigate quickly within the document. I found myself missing the navigation pane in MS Word or Open Office though. What Open Office (and MS Word) lacks though is the ability to edit or move sections of a document in that navigation pane. This is something that you will find in Jer's Novel Writer and in Scrivner (a Mac program I highly recommend).

I have been finding the act of organizing my discovery draft in Scrivener to be an invaluable aid in getting to the first draft. I am still in the 30 day free trial and I am about to shell out the $35 as an early birthday present. I don't usually buy software with a few exceptions but I am willing to pay for usefulness and innovation.

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12 Free Learning Networks for Students and Academics

Image via Wikipedia

The rise of new online technologies has reshaped the way people learn. Print reference sources, though still valuable, are no longer the primary gateway to information. Students and other academics have turned to social networks and collaborative learning communities to find research materials and increase their knowledge of various subjects.

There are many free learning networks that have been created specifically for students and academics. The following twelve sites are good examples. These online communities provide access to alternate forms of teaching and learning. They also offer a central place where like-minded people can easily meet and share information.

LearnCentral- LearnCentral combines social networking with live collaboration technology to provide a unique teaching and learning environment. Classrooms can connect with other classrooms, peers can connect with other peers, and groups can conduct online meetings and seminars.

LearnHub - This social learning network is home to a number of experts who can help with standardized tests, college admissions, and other academic pursuits. LearnHub also offers a community space for users who want to contribute educational information and learn from other members.

Sclipo - Sclipo is a social learning network that makes it easy for academics to teach and learn using the site's many built-in applications. Popular apps include a course manager, a document and video library, and a webcam-based classroom that can be used for live teaching and webinars

GCFLearnFree.org - Created and supported by the Goodwill Community Foundation, this global learning network provides free lessons on everything from math and money to careers and computers.

Academia.edu - This unique learning network can be used to find researchers with similar interests. The site's search feature also allows members track the latest developments in their research area and see what other people are researching.

Academici - Academici is a professional social network for academics and scientists. Site members include people from more than 200 countries.

GradeGuru - Designed specifically for college students, this knowledge sharing network makes it easy for students to share course notes and study together online. Members who share notes can earn gift cards, PayPal cash, and other rewards.

Pronetos - Pronetos is a social network for scholars, professors, and their institutions. The site encourages collaboration by allowing members to share papers, find research, post course materials, and share special announcements.

TheApple - TheApple is a learning community and social network for current and future educators. The site offers career resources, lesson plans, education-related quizzes, education news, teacher trivia, inspiring videos, and a community forum where members can chat and learn online.

Livemocha - Livemocha, the world's largest and most active online language learning community, provides a place for language learners to meet and communicate online. The site also offers free courses in 36 different languages and learning tips from native speakers.

LingQ - LingQ is a knowledge sharing network for language learners. Visitors who sign up for the site's free membership can meet other language learners online, take an unlimited number of free language lessons, and join live conversations for extra language practice.

VoxSwap - VoxSwap is another good place for people to learn new languages online. Members work together to teach each other new vocabulary words and language skills.

Guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about online degrees for OnlineDegreePrograms.org.

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Why Learning Styles Matter

There was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed last month that after reading it, I decided to promptly ignore. But it has been resurrected in a few places and Stephen Downe's referenced it recently as an argument against learning styles. The article is "Matching Teaching Styles to Learning Styles" by David Glenn. There are articles that are written just to generate letters to the editor and I think this was one of them. The article begins with "almost certainly, you were told that your instruction should match your students' styles. " (I have never heard anything of the kind. What I do hear is that we should strive to make our information multimodal.) And then introduces the argument from Pashler's recent paper that "there is no strong scientific evidence to support the "matching" idea, they contend in a paper published this week in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. And there is absolutely no reason for professors to adopt it in the classroom." The article then goes on to quote Sternberg who has conducted a lot of research in this field who says that "while he holds Mr. Pashler and his colleagues in high esteem, he believes they did a poor job here. Several of the most-cited researchers on learning styles, Mr. Sternberg points out, do not appear in the paper's bibliography. "The authors draw negative conclusions about a field they fail adequately to review," Mr. Sternberg says." So in other words, the author of the article is giving us this "it may or may not be a valid position" kind of argument.

What this article points out is that more research needs to be done in this field. It is not "evidence" of any kind that learning styles are not an issue. One thing these articles do point out is how uselessly narrow research has become and how important cross-disipline work is in education. "Conclusions" for or against the idea of learning styles in the education field ignore the entire history of the study of visual intelligence in the cognitive sciences.

In one of my previous incarnations as a tutor, I used to listen very carefully to how students described problems. Phrases like "I can' t understand a word my instructor says" or "he hands out these charts and they are all Greek to me" gave me important clues on how to shape my tutorials and teach students how to study. Gathering information from them about how they take in information would shape how they studied. And sometimes learning how a teacher delivers information would help us find disconnnects between how a particular student learns and their performance in class. We made no hard and fast universal conclusions about our practices and called them "learning style preferences." We were not scientists, but educators in the trenches out to solve real and immediate problems. We used learning style inventories for purely practical, common sense reasons - it worked. That said, I will agree that more work needs to be done to verify the claims that some educators have made. We did not use them to say "teachers should now teach differently" - we used the information to show the students ways to leverage their learning style. Some teachers can be threatened by the idea that a picture might actually aid their students in understanding what the hell they are saying, and some aren't. I feel like a Civil War nurse, I don't really know why people who get operated on with boiled surgical instruments survive but I am going to keep doing it anyway and look forward to the day when the medical schools come out with a Universal Germ Theory.

If learning styles don't matter, why bother using pictures, graphs, concept maps, video, or audio recordings? Why provide transcripts to videos? The real question that needs to be worked out is how learning styles matter and how to measure that effectively.

If you are in a successful, ivy leaguish, academic environment (a well-monied university, for instance), you are in the worst place possible to do this kind of research. The kinds of students you will get there are students who are strong read/write oriented people. The system is designed to weed everyone else out! I want to see someone working in the K-12 system (preferably special education) and in developmental ed classes at the community college level before they attempt to draw conclusions on learning theories based on a study of 500 Stanford juniors.

If learning styles do not matter, then I can deliver all information in a single modality (blocks of text) and everyone will get it - no matter what their background, culture, or experience. This just does not happen. How does one explain "illiterate" students finally learning how to read using the Montessori method? (They use images and manipulatives.)

Learning styles matter because as an instructional designer, I can use the principle of making course materials multimodal which increases the engagement of the learners.

A very useful summary of the issues are on Christy Tucker's blog.

Every day the same dream

Everyday the same dream is a work of Flash art from Molleindustria. It was made in 6 days for the Experimental Gameplay Project. (They have an interesting article online "Videogame Rules as a Political Medium.") What fascinated me about "Everyday the same dream" is that using simple animation and interface, the artist guides us through some really complex ideas. There are minimal instructions. This is a fantastic lesson in education technology - it shows a greater understanding about how we learn than nearly any other piece of software I have seen in a long time. Each time the player guides the protagonist through the day (or the dream), he is provided with subtle clues to interact with the environment and make changes. It is our sense of play that causes us to do things in the environment, to try different things. To move the "story" forward, you have to disrupt the flow of the given narrative - don't get in the car, pet the cow, go to work with no clothes on - things that might happen in a dream. It is during these "disruptions" that more information is gained and things begin to change. It is as if the author was saying that learning is the sum total of the disruptions we throw against an accepted idea.

The Connectivist 18th Century

I have written a couple of postings discussing the idea that Connectivism isn't new (it is just highly relevant right now). There is an interesting note in USA Today by Elizabeth Weise on a project at Stanford called "The Republic of Letters" put together by Dan Edelstein and Paula Findlen that visually maps the networks of letter writers in the 18th century. The project graphically reveals the networks through dynamic animation. Oxford University supplied information on 50,000 letters (15,000 of them written by Voltaire). Today's social media is merely faster and cheaper.

Weise writes "The 18th century was alive with networks. Despite what some might think today, they weren’t invented when the first email was sent in 1971.

'In fact, going all the way back to the Renaissance, scholars have establish

ed themselves into networks in order to receive the latest news, find out the latest discoveries and circulate the ideas of others,' says Edelstein."

This project is a good example of cross discipline studies (History, French, and programming) helping us gain an understanding of where we are now and where we are going. Truly in the spirit of connective knowledge.