It’s the end of the line for Course 1 at ISB. Lots more to think about, but Course 2 is looming.

My last post (and the readings that led to it: the 2009 Horizon Report (in particular the “Smart Object” section and Dianne Oblinger’s “Learning Spaces” (and specifically, her take on the “Learning Commons” got me “thinkering” – with the idea of documenting different kinds of learning activities already taking place in our Main Library – to see if there’s any  “thinkering” already taking place.

The results are, I think, interesting. Photos below were all taken between 9:00 am and 1:30 am on Friday, February 27th, 2008 in the Main Library. This covers one HS and two MS class periods along with HS Lunch.

And now, finally, a full-on positive take on a concept relevant to the world today, focused on “just-in-time” learning – and tied in  ways to the growing focus on technology as a vehicle for boosting students’ metacognitive achievements.

It incorporates my view that libraries need to become “application centers” (not in the sense of being a place where “Applications (ie computer applications) are housed, but a place where ideas are gathered, mulled over, and then applied to real-world problems.

The concept is to provide”Thinkering Spaces” in libraries and the idea is coming to a library near you – perhaps sooner than you can imagine. Perhaps even to ISB’s Main Library! In a recent School Head’s Blog Post, ISB Head Bill Gerritz proposed the need for an “Invention Center” at ISB. Coincidentally, our Main Library Review Committee is “edging” toward the idea of a newly developed Main Library as an “Information Learning Commons” rather than a traditional bricks ‘n mortar collection space.  Put these three concepts together and you’ve got an incredibly dynamic vision for the future of learning at ISB

Think “Minority Report”, where Tom Cruise stands at a Smart media wall and assembles all the bits he needs to draw conclusions which will allow him to not only solve, but to actually prevent a crime. Then think modular versions of Tom’s big wall set up in fully reconfigurable spots around a newly redesigned Main Library space. Think students, teachers, parents, and guests, all finding comfortable seating in appropriate spaces with specialized tools designed to let them turn their dreams into realities.

Got it!

POV: a god’s eye view from the back side of a darkened globe. The globe is haloed by the sun behind, the facing side lit only by sporadic, staccato flashes from a seething mass of thunderheads closing in on all quarters. The exception is a single point on the horizon where a quickly blossoming crack of brightness is spotlightng a gargantuan billboard on which are emblazoned tall, bold letters spelling out “Singulari…” The rest of the word is hidden below the horizon. Remaining detail across the globe is either blurred by the darkness or obscured by the gathering clouds.

Stock Photo: A View Of The Earth From Space Showing The Sun Rising Over The Middle East And AfricaImage ID: SES1043 Stock Photo By: Public Domain – DP

The camera slowly zooms in and pans across the scene in a night-vision rendition picking out  details…

…A ship -  one of the latest miniature floating cities , powers along the darkened sea on a hell-bent-for-leather course for the distant billboard. The boat is lit up like the proverbial Christmas-tree, but a quick omniscient scan from bridge to bilge reveals that most of the light comes from a profusion of glowing laptop screens.

Over each of the laptops is hunched a figure either madly keying in code, fixedly tracking a mouse-driven screen cursor, or gazing catatonically into some digital virtuality just unleashed. Hypnotically blinking LED tags on the party hats affected by each figure proclaim random variations of, “Technology, “Advocate”, “Teacher”, “Resource. “Coordinator”, “Director” or “Evangelist”.

A cutaway closeup shows a cramped bridge deserted but for a single Crystal Eye whirring disconsolately as it tries to autofocus on the distant horizon.

From the bridge a slow pan around the exterior reveals the boat’s scuppers littered with electronic detritus; silicon motherboard fragments, orphaned cables, discarded desktop housings and blackened peripherals from hard-drives to sketchpads to cameras.  Above the scuppers, the gunwales are festooned with the clinging arms, legs, and upper bodies of those now replaced by the current laptop operators. Some of these are hanging precariously over the side; others flop bonelessly in the scuppers, apparently exhausted by their efforts. Many clutch pieces of discarded equipment or even tattered textbooks, and some have pocket protectors still guarding anachronistic computing devices. These figures all wear dark-lensed virtual reality goggles with nametags stickered on the oversized ear-pieces, along with the designations such as “Computer Science Teacher”, “Information Technologist”, “Media Specialist” or “Multimedia Coordinator”

Dragging from the stern of the hydroplaning craft are a tangled profusion of lifelines.  Most are attached to white life-preserver rings pogoing emptily across the surface of the sea through which they are being dragged. Some  flap wildly in the breeze, their preservers having been torn away by the weight of swimmers clinging to them and the speed of the craft ahead. A few of the lines stretch tautly back to elongated rings to which grimly cling a bedraggled assortment of “hangers-on”.  Zooming in on these reveals that they wear all-natural fibre knitted caps with embroidered nametags revealing names like “Earth”, “Sierra”, “Travis” or “Moon-child” above designations of teacher, administrator, parent, and, of course, librarian. A full closeup shows the librarian’s passage through the water to be further impeded by a wooden card-catalog drawer to which he clings and a MARC record manual he clutches with his off-hand.

Pulling back from the players in this little scenario, the camera pans around the sea through which the liner plows. All around, the bobbing heads of swimmers in various states ranging from frenzy to determination to resignation, begin to take shape in the gloom. As they do, the beanies they wear all reveal generic “student” labels, and behind these, circling in the middle distance, are a profusion of fins cutting through the water, circling ever closer. As they come into focus, the fins reveal RF tags with glowing letters reading, variously;

• 21st-Century Curriculum
• 20th Century Student Workload
• 19th-Century Assignment-Types
• 18th-Century Teaching Practices
• IBO SL, HL & EE Expectations
• College Apps & Costs
• Social Network Pressures
• Extracurriculur Expectations
• Drugs & Alcohol

Finally, in the middle distance, somewhere between the circling fins and the glowing “Singulari…” obelisk at the edge of the screen, low hulking shapes begin to coalesce =. As the camera focuses, flags fluttering on the summit of each of these bergs reveal that they, too, carry banners reading;

• Global warming
• Rising Sea Levels
• Displaced Populations

• Expanding Disease Vectors

• Regional Water shortages

• Global Carrying Capacity Population overload

• Unanticipated Climate Change Effects

***

Attributed to John Seely Brown, the term “passion-based learning” jumped out at me as I read the course assignment on “Reinventing Project Based Learning. For years, when I’ve met with IB students beginning their Extended Essay, a 4000 word research paper on a topic of their choice, I’ve exhorted them to “pick a topic that they’re passionate about”.

“This is your chance,” I tell them, “to finally investigate something that YOU are interested in. For some of you, this will be your first opportunity to actually research something you care about. Don’t waste the opportunity!”

Just because we want students to follow their passions, though, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they must use digital tools to do so. More than one IB Extended Essay in the past three years has achieved a respectable score with almost NO reliance on digital resources. In one example, the student pored over current examples of graphic novels and then fashioned a thesis, entirely of her own creation, which she successfully defended in her paper. In another, a student read just two of Stephen King’s works, along with the works of another contemporary novelis, and then compared their probable motivations and the resulting literary devices they used – once again, with no reliance on digital resources.

Next week, I have the good fortune to be able to join our Week Without Walls Jewelry trip. During this week, when many ISB students will be off on overseas adventures from Russia to Australia,  20 ISB students will be staying at home to create a small piece of jewelry using the “lost-wax” technique, where they sculpt something unique from a block of wax resin, and have the result cast in silver.

Although not every student who has ended up in Jewelry as their “Week Without Walls” trip is passionate about this experience, I had the good fortune to meet a student last week, who IS passionate about this experience. Although he is will be off on another adventure himself next week, he showed me a sampling of the unique creations he has fashioned in two semesters of Jewelry at ISB.  I will follow this post up with photos of this student’s work, but for now, since I didn’t get pictures when I first saw the work, I’ll need to just describe some of his pieces, which include;

• a pair of miniature, fully functioning crossbows, each about 3 inches long. One fires a small dart that the student fashioned along with the crossbow, while the other fires a standard sewing needle. “Violent tendencies”, I hear you say, but the precision, the attention to detail and the purely tactile skill necessary to create these miniature marvels is a perfect example of a student following a passion to learn to its logical conclusion
• a tiny (about an inch and a half long) silver semi-automatic handgun. Although this one is non-operational in that it doesn’t shoot anything, the slide functions, the trigger operates, and the handgrips are tricked out in tiny hand-carved cherry-wood grips. Again, I hear the rumblings about the fascination with engines of destruction that his choice of subject suggests, but once again, the student’s attention to detail, manifested in the precision with which he fashioned this tiny artifact, is nothing short of amazing.

What’s the one defining characteristic of the students in these four examples – aside from the fact that they were all passionate about the work in which they were engaged, and they all developed new skills in the course of the experience which led to the creation of something unique and new (an original theses or a unique piece of jewelry) which made the (constructivist) learning authentic, since, in each case, it has helped them move further along the career path they have chosen.

Simply put, neither these, nor ANY of the projects that the 30 students taking the Jewelry course next week will create, requires a SINGLE digital skill. In spite of the fact that the “Project-based Learning” article states baldly that “Authentic projects involve digital resources”, this is simply NOT true for every learning experience that a 21st-century student may encounter.There are still learning experiences for which good old-fashioned “hands-on” learning is still best.

Call me old-fashioned, if it reinforces your conception that “digital” is the new chic. For me, it’s about using digital tools when they offer a clearly better learning option – but using digital options as additive, rather than an alternative, learning tools.

I commented on the New Blooms Taxonomy in the last post. I like it. I think it’s a logical evolutionary development to a seminal work that has stood the test of time. The new change give the nod to new technologies, new approaches to the teaching/learning symbiosis and changing needs of today’s learner. But it doesn’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater”, and that’s refreshing. ‘Nuff said

This week, I’ve been spending more time with the MacArthur Foundation Report. I’m pleased to see that we’ll be looking at this report several times. There is an awful lot to digest here. Beginning with just their definition of New Media

“…a media ecology where more traditional media, such as books, television, and radio, are “converging” with digital media, specifically interactive media and media for social communication.”

I’m all in favor or using this “ecology” to connect in new ways, the many and disparate resource types we’ve brought to the table, with varying levels of success (usually not much) beginning in the ’60s;

• Programmed Learning – early days of computers assumed the machine could replace the teacher. Through the next 30 years, each new plateau in computing power has brought a new version of this old saw.

What I DON’T see happening is that “New Media” is so radically different from the technologies that preceded, and will become ubiquitous, so that it that it will completely revolutionize teaching and learning. The big stumbling block here is ubiquity. There are still 5 BILLION people on the planet without adequate nutrition or guaranteed access to fresh water, much less electricity and the “ubiquitous” access to New Media Tools.

.. we are interested in the media ecology that youth inhabit today.”

Good for the MacArthur Foundation, but there’s nothing revolutionary here. Youth have always “inhabited” a different “media ecology” from older generations. It goes with the territory of being a teen, experimenting with life and carving a personal niche in it. Examples abound related to the music of  (and the list could be expanded both ways;

• the “Roaring 20’s” – Prohibition, Speakeasies, Flappers (dress and manners) – all spoke “NEW MEDIA” (read: breaking from the past/thumbing noses at tradition/using new available resources)
• the “Beat Scene” of the ’50’s -  Rock ‘n Roll was the quintessential new medium of expression. The beginnings of Technology’s impact on the media (electric guitars)
• the Psychedelic ’60’s. Add drugs, free love and the Moog Synthesizer…
• the ’80’s – Rap & Hip-Hop, “Spin-Doctors”, RAVE, Techno
• the 2000’s – Interactive Media, Web2.0

We have used the term “new media” rather than terms such as “digital media” or “interactive media” because we are examining a constellation of changes to media technology that can’t be reduced to a single technical characteristic. Current media ecologies often rely on a convergence of digital and online media with print, analog, and non-interactive media types.

It’s Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age I want to take aim at in this post

Connectivism – I’m troubled by what seems to be the contention that the “New Media” is going to bring about a sort of “hive mind” through the development of Personal Learning Networks which will inform learners in any discipline so that they are able to effectively learn “within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual“

My problem is that this premise seems built on what I see as a utopian ideal in which every human on the planet has access to the same resources and has the same sort of information needs. At the most basic level, this just isn’t the case. The world is still divided into a couple hundred different geopolitical units, each with a unique cultural identity and different national ideals, not to mention multiple languages, local customs and such.

George Siemen’s statement that “Connectivism presents a model of learning that acknowledges the tectonic shifts in society where learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity betrays his western conceit that “society” means the western, largely English-speaking, and technologically advanced countries.Even Mexico, the country of Siemen’s birth, does not qualify, except in the large cities, and even there only in “wired” pockets of these.

The problem is, that these twenty or thirty countries represent perhaps one of the almost seven billion people on the planet. So while “Connectivism” as a Learning Theory may have relevance in segments of this limited societal strata, it just does not relate to the vast majority of learners on the planet today. Rice-farmers in rural Thailand, China or India probably, not to mention the vast majority of factory and mill-workers the world over, probably rely on Behaviorist learning to ensure that the successful strategies of millenia are continued.  The engineers, architects and economists who design the equipment, mechanical infrastructures and global marketing systems to both perpetuate and improve these likely learned their trades through Cognitive Learning principles. In recent year, Constructivism has offered a new way of helping learners to construct new knowledge. Constructivist Learning may arguably be responsible for most of the great advances in Science, Medicine and technology of the last half-century.

And this is where the biggest argument against “Connectivity” as a Learning Theory comes in. Basically, it seems to me the Connectivity, while a powerful exploitation of the power of the new tools available to learners, is a new Means to an End, rather than the End itself. If we accept this premise, then Connectivity can be relegated to its proper place in the scheme of things. For a lucid summary of why , see the various writings of Bill Kerr, either at his blog, or at the Learning Theory Evolves Wiki.

what about plumbers, carpenters, mechanics: