@GlblCanuck posted this on our school email today:
ECOO germination
Whole responses on each to follow, but right now here’s what the ECOO 2011 Conference germinated for me:
- thanks to a question during my Dancing in the Datasphere presentation (which almost 500 people have viewed now!): “has anyone thought though this from a how it harms the students perspective? Or are we all just rushing to ipad up each child?“
We need to pay attention to what long term screen use does to children… especially if we’re going to push for it on a one screen per child basis, which most people at ECOO seemed to be longing for. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge screen geek, we have no less than… 9 screens in our house, but some intelligent analysis can guide us to best use policies with this stuff.
- The mini-lab still has a lot of interest behind it. If we’re going to de-centralize school board IT access, this is a great first step that puts digital literacy back in the hands on teachers. We need to reclaim digital literacy if we’re going to own and direct it in the future.
- Diana M’s digital footprint seminar provoked a great deal of discussion. Someone said that they aren’t going to give the internet to lunatics and perverts in Royan and Zoe’s seminar on a similar subject, and I’m all in with her. Fear will not guide us in developing coherent digital pedagogy; something I think we need to seriously develop if we’re going to meaningfully adopt social media in a useful manner.
- The idea of decentralizing school teaching and using technology to adopt student focused and driven learning is divine. But we’re never going to have it mean anything if the ministry keeps mandating standardized testing and the strictly adhered to curriculums that feed into that testing. Finland, the number one school system in the world, doesn’t use standardized testing but sets very high standards for its teachers. Until we do the same, we’re going to stay stuck in third place looking for ways to cheat test results rather than teach students meaningfully.
Cutting Cookies
CBC radio was playing a phone call from parent with a child diagnosed with ADHD yesterday afternoon and I’m having a knee jerk reaction to it. The responses were based on THIS story.
I Hope They Realize Where They Are
Having just been to my first unconference, I’m still buzzing with the energy, collaboration, disagreement and accord. It wasn’t easy, or comfortable, but it was relevant, and it was VERY ENERGIZING.
This week I head to one of my favourite not un-conferences, ECOO. This is the conference that got me onto twitter, got me building pln, got me blogging, got me into so many different ideas around technology in the classroom that it has changed my practice, it’s a fantastic piece of work. It’s also the first conference I ever presented at, and I’m presenting there again this year. ECOO works for me on so many levels, but this year I’m worried about the linchpin to the whole thing: the keynote addresses.
This year, as in other years, they’ve trotted up American presenters who, for the most part, present a consistent polemic of fear, anxiety and need for radical change. It’s all very exciting, and radical, and urgent, and necessary, if you’re in America. In the U.S. they’ve demonized the teaching profession (and public service jobs in general), gutted public education (and services in general) and done everything in their power to privatize what’s left. In the process they are astonished that they’ve become uncompetitive.
What I fear is going to happen at ECOO is that two Americans are going to stand up and quote American statistics at us (again), while urging us to throw out everything we’re doing and radically revise our failing education system. Ah, the polemics of fear and upheaval; what happens when you let short term business interests (there are no other) run your society.
Except, of course, the Canadian education system isn’t failing, it’s fantastic. We graduate more students, reach more with special needs and do it at a higher rate than almost any other human society on earth. We have to keep working at it as hard as we have to keep it at the front, but throwing out everything we’ve done only works for a system that’s in tatters, like the U.S. system.
I live in hope that the keynotes will actually research what they are walking in to and not treat us like a 51st state (again). If they don’t, expect some snippy back channel comments come Thursday morning. I’m prepared to defend what we have done and what we are doing, it’s important.
I’ve already had to go through this once this year (at great cost to my board), I’m going to lose patience doing it again.
Note: The speakers were fantastic, taking an audience participation approach, heavily using technology (when the hotel internet would work… I thought private business was supposed to be all masterful with this stuff), and emphasizing what we are doing right, rather than what the US is doing wrong. Well done all.
Mosaika Sound and Light Show | Mosaika spectacle son et lumière
Caught this by accident while walking around Parliament Hill at sunset the other day. The Ottawa natives were too cool to stick around, but we’re glad we did.
I’m an immigrant to Canada, and it took me a long time to get my citizenship, but moments like this laying on the lawn with my son and wife in front of Parliament seeing such an honest and heartfelt expression of the Canadian experience was truly moving.
If you’re in Ottawa and are hanging out downtown around sunset, do yourself a favour and go catch this show.
I’ve got a soft spot for building projection systems anyway, it’s architecture made fluid and digital. I’d love to take the cold, institutional grey building bricks of my school and digitize it like this, but the projectors are wicked expensive! When you see something like Mosaika, you begin to realize just how powerful fluid digital architecture and lighting can be.
Via Flickr:
Mosaika is the story of Canada – our story. A powerful narrative set against the spectacular backdrop of Parliament Hill, Mosaika takes the audience on an unforgettable journey of sound and light, as we explore Canada’s physical, historical and cultural landscapes.
Don’t miss this free, bilingual show. Presented nightly in Canada’s Capital Region. From July 8 through September 12, 2010.
Mosaika raconte l’histoire du Canada — notre histoire. Par la magie du son et de la lumière, ce saisissant spectacle, présenté sur la colline du Parlement, nous fait vivre un voyage inoubliable à la découverte des paysages, de l’histoire et de la culture du Canada.
Ne manquez pas ce spectacle bilingue gratuit, présenté tous les soirs, du 8 juillet au 12 septembre 2010, dans la région de la capitale du Canada.
22C Ed: Gaming School
Kyle looked at the stairs going up to the next floor, he couldn’t unlock the door to them, but he could peer through the small windows to the painted walls and carpeted floors beyond.
The Perfect Interface
Thinking about tablets recently, I’ve been trying to imagine what the perfect online interface would be. Since getting a smartphone and doing the Web2.0 thing, I’m finding I don’t go to the internet like I used to, getting online is now a micro event, not the main event. Web2.0 wants you to pop in and out in social media, produce content and grab information relevant to what you’re doing in reality, and that doesn’t fit well with a desktop.
Spotty Internet & Spoiling The Argument
I’m feeling bad about bad mouthing the board internet now. The last few events I’ve been to seem to point to continuous and crappy wifi execution at the enterprise level. Does good high usage wifi exist anywhere?
Simulation In Education: DM as teacher
Simplifying game play/in-class simulation as an add on to existing, simplistic lessons is certain to fail. You might have success the first time you do it based student response to a new, novel approach to learning, but repeating a simplistic gaming pattern will quickly cause students to drop out of the simulation. The game has to have enough complexity and contextual development or it will be too easy for students to step out of the game, it needs to be encompassing.
Some thoughts on sims in education:
– Teacher as referee rather than resource, puts focus on student to figure out material. Sports do this well, creating an apparently certain context (it’s all made up, buy you couldn’t convince a hockey player of the arbitrary nature of the rules they are playing in)
– “The point of economic policy in a game isn’t to simulate reality; it’s to make the synthetic scarcity so entertaining that the truly scarce good (the players’ time) goes toward solving problems in the game, not in the outer world.” Geekonomics. Simulation should be designed around maximizing player’s experience within the game context.
– Immersion is a powerful thing! Rewarding a student’s immersion in a game by rewarding their efforts within the simulation is key.
– What is better? Intrinsic or extrinsic motivation (intrinsic is, extrinsic is transient)
– Must develop an intrinsic motivation! It’s better to have a ‘good in itself’, summum bonum,or some fecundity (both much more motivating) or else players are just jumping through hoops, the teacher won’t get their best work, students don’t get best learning.
– Is curriculum motivating in itself? No, just a set of arbitrary government rules. At best it offers a Foursquare like badging system (grades), or a sudden, harsh result (post secondary options). Grade leveling is eased all the way until they hit the wall of trying to access post secondary (something that seems far away in the teenage mind). Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could gamify the student experience? “You’re a level 11 writer and a level 6 hockey player? Cool.”
– What makes a motivated student? Relevance of material? Control of the situation? Social interaction? Non-confrontational relationship with teacher? Strong interpersonal relationship with teacher? Sense of self-direction? Self confidence?
– Immersive simulation adapts to each student experience, (must) offers contextual, supporting material, develops confidence because the student’s experience prompts the learning, develops a supportive, non confrontational relationship with the teacher.
Simulation development has to go well beyond the Khan Academy approach, it has to offer an immersive, meaningful, personalized experience, and you can’t do that by adapting lessons, you need to begin with big ideas and work the lessons into that coherent whole.
Types of Genius
I just re-read a fantastic article in WIRED about types of genius.
After examining art history, an economics professor noticed two distinct expressions of genius. There is the Conceptualist, who usually goes right after her goals with a preconceived notion of how to get there. Conceptualists usually peak early and loudly, they are the ‘typical’ kind of child genius people think of, like Mozart. The less well known creative genius is the Experimentalist. They slowly develop across their lives and their greatest work usually comes later in life.
Someone like Jackson Pollack didn’t really start producing until his thirties and didn’t really hit his stride until well into his forties. His early work is terrible. He developed his style through years of trial and error, hence, an experimentalist.
Picasso’s greatest works came early and created an incredible shock wave. He had a preconceived notion of what he wanted to do and did it. As a conceptualist his work presented a radical change in how things were done. While he produced many great works across his long life, it is generally understood that his early work presents his strongest.
I’ve always liked Robert Frost, and now that I know his history, I see he’s an experimentalist, just like me. It’s nice to be in such good company. As a late bloomer myself, I remember the painful efforts of my teachers to educate me when I simply wasn’t ready for it. I was always a good reader and writer, but even my English teachers (I now have an honours degree in English) couldn’t reach me (“a disruptive influence in class”). I finally had the sense to drop out (something kids aren’t allowed to do any more) and work for a few years before I went back and graduated at the age of 22.
It makes you wonder just what a FAILURE in a course really means. I had my fair share of them, and they weren’t exactly great for my slow-motion approach to development.
The recent round of ‘your son is not up to STANDARDS’ from his elementary teachers had me very worried, but when I dug up this article again, I feel a bit better. Even geniuses can arrive last, being off-average in school is by no means an indicator of your actual abilities, it’s simply a system based on averages. Exceptionality lives outside of those averages, I’d rather be there than in the NORMAL range.