Is Listening Reading?

In the last few years, I picked a habit. At the beginning it was innocent. I listened to a podcast or two. I picked up Duncan's History of Rome and binge listened. The habit developed slowly and now I have about 10+ podcasts that I listen to on a weekly basis.

It turned out this was just the entry drug. A few months ago I took the plunge and joined Audible while using Libby to consume library available audiobooks. I like Libby, but often the books I wanted were not available or my time to consume them ran out mid-book. I have since started consuming books on audible while still using paper and digital print.

I find audiobook especially powerful when the reading adds more than it takes away. For example, for MLK day I listened (consumed?) The Radical King by Cornell West (editor), the audio version used some of the leading African American voices adding depth and meaning to the text.

Turns out I am not the only picking up audio. In 2017 alone the growth in usage was over 20% (see here). the reports also show that listeners also continue reading on paper. This signifies a potential change of habits, use of libraries, and eventually education.

So why am I bringing this up? I wonder what consuming books in this way does to comprehension. Does it impede comprehension? does it make it easier? What strategies can we use to improve listening comprehension? A literature search on Google Scholar quickly showed that most of the research on listening has been done through the lens of second language acquisition. While this makes sense it also means that we truly do not know what impact will listening have on literacy. Time to roll up my sleeves and do some research. I promise to report back when I do.

Still Thinking

I have been away from the blog. It was an opportunity to explore other skills and ways of acting in the world. I am ready to integrate my new skills as a recruiter and administrator to the work of innovation.

This morning I listened to the Freakonomics podcast after weeks of Audible listening. In the interview with Andrew Yang. Mr. Yang shared his anxiety about the country (indeed the world) preparing for the social changes resulting from automation and AI. I think that whatever the next few transition years will yield in society, we as educators should be readying our students for this future. This next generation of citizens, workers, and thinkers will need flexible skills and be habituated into learning constantly.

This is not a simple task and we really do not fully understand what it should look like. What I do know is that we have to experiment and design new teacher education efforts that will give us and the next generation a fighting chance.

Designing new programs is not a guarantee that we will succeed. Not trying will guarantee failure.

Innovative Schools Teacher Preparation

Lately Laurie Friedrich and I have been spending time thinking about preparing teachers to thrive in innovative schools. We spent a significant amount of time laying out the outline of a path that will lead us there. Our mission is to prepare educators who are effective and confident facilitating learning in innovative settings.

This goal emerged from our interaction with school leaders who have indicated to us a challenge in finding and retaining educators who can be effective teaching in innovative settings. We think that it it because traditional teacher education programs are not providing the skills and dispositions needed in innovative learning settings. The group we are proposing will lead to a program that will support innovative schools by providing teachers who can facilitate learning in a variety of settings using inquiry, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration. Our objective is to have a program to supplement traditional teacher education with the skills and dispositions that will create educators who can be consistently successful in innovative schools.

Being a full citizen in the 21st century requires life-long learning that fosters design thinking and innovation. This life-long learning is shaped during the school years. Innovative schools show how to grow this next generation of thinkers and creators, and lead the way for more traditional school systems. Our program aims to grow the educators that will be the backbone of transformation. These schools need the teachers who will make sure such schools are successful and can try new ideas. Our plan is to help these schools by preparing interested classroom and prospective teachers who can step in ready to teach in innovative ways.

The Challenge of Aurality/Orality

I am an avid podcast listener. I listen to fiction podcasts such as Fictional, the Moth. I listen to a whole host of non-fiction podcasts including the History of Byzantium, History of Rome and Tides of History among others. At the same time I see the rise of Audible and Amazon audible books.

I love spoken audio. I actually prefer it to music most of the time. What I cannot figure out yet is what that means for literacy. Literacy development has been determined by print, its limitations and power. Storytelling from memory was replaced by reading from the page (still out loud) to finally being replaced by silent reading and prolific writing. Radio brought back listening to stories and reports. The rise of the internet has made all of us potential authors. Now the ability to deliver audio has opened a new opening for orality.

The question that I would like to pose is how will the proliferation of orality impact literacy and by extension schools. Do we need to teach more listening skills? How do we add oral creation to our composition classes?

One area to use as a bridge is poetry. Poetry even when written, always pushes toward the performative, the audible. Poetry out loud, spoken word competitions, and raps can help see orality and text as part of the same yarn.

That said I am still wondering about the relative value of orally consumed text. Does it stick in memory as well? What strategies help comprehension and recall? No answers, mostly questions.

Dashboarding and Self Regulation

I have two new devices in my life. The first is my iWatch bought last weekend in LA and the second is my Ford C-Max hybrid. I love both devices (and yes my car is a devices).  They both speak to my other devices and operate as part of my digital life.
Both have dashboard that are aimed at improving my behavior. the iWatch has an activity monitor that uses a very simple design to see if I am reaching my daily movement goals (exercise, standing, and walking). It is easily accessible through one tap on the face of the watch.

My hybrid has a dashboard that informs me how green is my my driving. It provides feedback on energy storing, breaking behavior and overall effective energy consumption. This has changed my behavior, at least in the short run. I am driving more cautiously and I am keenly aware of accelartaion and sudden stops.

I always knew that movement is good for me or that driving in a more even way would reduce fuel consumption. At the same time there quite a gap between knowing and acting on the knowledge. This is where the dashboards come to our rescue. Dashboards tell us how we do and give us formative feedback so we evaluate our performance in situ and even take corrective action. What I am less sure of is how long this effect will last. But if the dashboards create a lasting effect then it is worth thinking about the potential leverage in critical points in education.

I do not think that we can dashboard our whole life- it is simply too much to take in on a regular basis. But if we can identify critical practices that would be supported by a dashboard then we should at least attempt to that.

My idea is to start with device use for students. I can easily imagine an app that shows device use across 3-4 categories: Reading, Games, Social Media, Learning. A dashboard like that can easily show students how much of the time they are using different modes. This is especially important as we consider what might be a productive learning use of devices provided by schools.

Three reasons ed researchers should create digitally

I have a large digital footprint with hundreds of blog posts and video series with over 100,000 views. In addition I put everything I publish online without pay walls the second I am allowed to. I have profiles on Academia.com, LinkedIn, Google Scholar and Researchgate. If you are an educational researcher you are most likely to have less of an online  presence. Many researchers do not have any. Here are three reasons to have a meaningful online presence:

1. You gain readership. Let's face it, most professionals and amateurs start learning about any topic using a simple google search. If you want to find your audience and your audience to find you, you MUST be online where they can find you. Once they find you (through a piece you wrote, a blog post etc.), they can follow up on anything else you published on that or any other topics. They might even register to follow any updates you make. This is a great way to connect and have an impact. Because:
2. Educational research is highly contextualized. As a result it has limited shelf life. That means that you need to reach your audience quickly. In a few decades (or even less) contexts changes enough to render many of our conclusion invalid. If no one consumes (read, watch, listen) to ideas, and results now they may be obsolete by the time people find them. Which brings me to my last point:
3. We need to talk to a wide constituency. It includes students, teachers, administrators, policy makes and the public. Writing for a wide audience is much more effective through digital channels that give everyone free immediate access to research findings and thinking.

South Africa- The promise and Challenge of Education

My last day in South Africa I had lunch with faculty from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. I had an enlightening conversation with Vusi Msiza a lecturer and current PhD student. The conversation was focused on what I prefer to call the South African miracle- the fact that South Africa was able to emerge from Apartheid with a bloody civil war.  Vusi helped me see how close South Africa came to a civil war and how the combination of luck and leadership prevented a downward spiral. We then turned to the recursive relationship between poverty and educational attainment. I made my argument that for South Africa to succeed in its lofty educational goals it needs a different approach. What I saw around the country was mostly a striving to reach 20th century panaceas. At the same time we both recognized the impact of economics on potential outcomes for kids as can be seen in the figure below.

On the flight back I continued thinking about this as a design problem and came up with a few interesting ideas that emerged from my observations of education in South Africa.
1. Elementary schools should be bilingual immersion program that include a local non-English language (say isiZulu) and English. Right now some school are monolingual in k-3 and then switch to English. The research literature really supports bilingual immersion programs and they can offer many cognitive benefits. They also offer identity benefits as home language can be supported longer. Finally it prevents hard transition when language of instruction switches to English.
2. An effort like will need an emphasis on teacher training for teaching in bilingual environments- a job for leading university. Another need would be to create enough curriculum in all 11 languages so a vision like that could come to pass.
3. Use out of school time to encourage entrepreneurship and technology use. The current school system is not equipped to provide these development tools quickly and it may be easier to do outside the traditional systems with their established matric goals.
4. Realize that change in education has to come with community development and job opportunities. Without those any effort will die because those participating will lose hope and may eventually become a radical element.

There is much more that needs doing but these are my ten cents and my frustration. I dislike not being able to do anything about it!

Ingenuity

Yesterday we visited the Langa township and took a walking tour. One of the things that struck me as we walked around was the ingenuity of the inhabitants in reusing materials to build what ever was needed.
We saw a little girl play with a colorful push toy similar to the Fisher Price one. It was ingeniously built, rotated nicely and I have a feeling worked better than a real one would given the conditions.

A second example is the radio transistor for sale (in the picture). The cretors have emptied a transistor radio and then used recycled materials (bottle caps, wire, cans to create a beautiful pop art product. Even more ingenious is the fact that the creators found ways to mass manufacture the device.

It made me  think about the potential of the same minds if we dropped a "Do Space" in the middle of camp. I suspect that with minimal guidance kids, young and older adults could create products in 3D pronter , learn from computers and CODE like demons. I know I have sometimes naive ideas and that they may not work. What I know for sure is that the other, standard ways, are not really setting up the kids of that area for success.

Neads, Wants, and Tech

In the las two days Jennifer Davidson and I have been discussing needs vs. wants. Which led me to ask myself a few questions. The first is what are needs in 21st century education. I would argue those are access, connectivity, internet, caring teachers, mixed with hope and actual opportunity to enact your hopes.

Yes there are more basic needs (air, shelter, health,, nutrition) without which educational needs matter less BUT in the 21st century the internet and person to person connectivity are items that must be available. Without them distributed equally, gaps within and between nations will continue to grow.

What are your tech needs vs. wants?

South Africa, Tech, and the Future of Education

I am in South Africa with a vibrant group of educators. It is my second visit to South Africa. We are on the dawn of our second day in Cape Town.

The visit to one of the leading countries in modern Africa poses real educational questions and concerns. From my previous visit it is fairly clear that there is great concern with "catching up". My sense is that this game of catch up will never succeed. Nor should it. I think that the potential of the new economies and the innovator nations is in finding alternatives. In redefining.

My mind keeps coming back to Mitra's presentation in his 2013 TED Award presentation. He claimed that our current education system was designed to feed the human computer system in the Age of Empire. This argument rings true, it combines many claims by others about the industrial nature of modern education with a much more practical aspect of it.  But the most powerful statement is the one I think can guide schools in a nation like South Africa just like it can in a nation like the US. Education is NOT broken. It is obsolete!

If it is so, then South Africa (or any developing country) is on equal footing with any developing nation. Technology and new ideas can serve the foundation to a whole new approach that is alternative to the Imperial Machine. Somewhat appropriate if it grows in post colonial countries. I doubt this happens until someone decides that chasing 19th and 20th century goals.

It is akin to the revolutionary effect of cell phones in developing countries- hurdling over multiple development phases and landing in the present. I do not agree with all of Mitra's points (it is hinted at in this article) but he presents a compelling rationale for change.

I have embedded Mitra's presentation below.


 

I'm Back

It has been almost a year since I blogged last. I took much needed time away from blogging to think, rethink and pursue other duties in administration. But now, that I have finished some of my administrative duties I have decided it is time to come back to blogging as a path to thinking and sharing projects ideas and thoughts. My goal for blogging is to think through what is next and tinker with bringing some of that vision to life.

Ten Ways to Use Pokemon Go in your Classroom this year

You may or may not be a Pokemon player. Either way as Pokemon Go fever sweeps the world it can serve us well to understand it and find ways to make it useful in our classrooms. And, NO, I do not mean use it as a reward. We have been here before with Minecraft so you can definitely take some of the ideas and use with other games as well.

1. Make them write fan fiction about Pokeomn Go adventures.

When it is appropriate let and even encourage students to write about Pokemon Go. Students often lack detail in their writing, Pokemon Go can be a great catalyst to adding details to a story. The complexity and richness of the Pokemon world can also encourage students to write fan fiction stories that spean multiple chapters. The advantage of supporting longer more complex writing is conducive to writing development, new and rich vocabulary and reading comprehension.

2. Make them write tips or steps.

Expository writing is often hard for students. One expository task is writing directions. I have seen many students struggle to write out directions for making a sandwich. Instead, we could challenge our students to write out the steps to achieving a goal on Pokemon Go. Imagine the direction to hatching a Pokemon egg, or getting your squirtle to evolve. If you know nothing about Pokemon, that's OK, your students can generate these ideas very readily.

3. Make a directions video.

This is very similar to the previous point but this time the composition is multi modal. Students can use still frames or video of a partner playing to create those. They can even narrate and edit the video teaching 21st century composing skills.

DO NOT FORGET TO LET THEM PUBLISH ELECTRONICALLY

This will create a sense of audience and provide examples of products

4. Learn about cultural or art sites.

POkemon Go relies on public sites. Ask your students to report on the sites available in the community. Students can write down the sites and then research the site, artist and significance.

DO NOT FORGET TO HAVE EQUIVALENT ACTIVITIES FOR THE NON-PLAYERS

You can use non- gaming apps like Google Maps or paper alternatives.

5. Work on the metric system and conversions.

Poekemon Go is metric. This is a great opportunity to discuss metric measurement and their conversion. This is great because I hear that metric is important for science.

6. Discuss the value of effort and learning from experience.

When we develop Grit in students we emphasize the role of persistence and coping with failure. Make students relate their efforts on Pokemon Go. Every one of them will have a story of persevernce that you can then turn into a story about academics.

7. Gamify your classroom with Pokemon Go like idea.

This is definitely for those ready to use game mechanics in their classroom. You will need to get at least a rudimnetary sense of the game before you start. I can easily see a classroom in which workstations are poke stops generating tokens for completed works. The tokens can be converted to Pokemon eggs. Hatching eggs can be related to number of pages read, homework completion- you name it. Leaderboards would also be helpful.

8. Create a Pokemon Go diary.

Have students write a daily diary about Pokemon or other daily activities. The richness of their experiences can help support their notion of strategic thinking and problem solving- if you help them occasionally to think in those terms.

9. Use Pokemon go ideas to teach about observation in nature (bird watching, animal watching etc.

10 Teach self-regulation with devices using activity journaling.

Maybe the hardest challenge in teaching 21st century kids is the difficulty in teaching self monitoring of device use. A way to negotiate this difficulty is to ask students to log in their device use as a way to start thinking about how much and for what ourpose they use the phone. Manuaaly logging the information in is crucial because it makes them actively think about their use.

In short I belive we can use popular games to support learning of skills and as a way to update our classrooms and make them more engaging!

The Three (Plus) Collaboration Apps I Use Every Day

1. Google Drive

There is nothing like it! No one has figured out how to enable real-time digital collaboration like Google did. At the composing and creating phase, I do everything in google drive and especially in google docs. The ability to travel in time in a single fully integrated documents has made collaboration seamless and always a blended experience. Even when I work right next to colleagues, we all look at the same product. In the days before the Google suite, we shuttled documents back and forth often losing the flow at one point or another.

2. Video Conferencing
I did not name one such app because I use different ones with different collaborators. Since I am fairly adept at technology, I use whatever others are used to. That is why I use: Adobe Connect, Skype, Zoom, Hangouts, and even Facetime. If I were pressed, I would name Skype as my most commonly used video conferencing app. This is how I connect to co-authors, students, and potential collaborators.

3. Social Media
Social media is my way to learn from people I do not know (or at least know well). My favorites are Twitter and Google Plus. Twitter has a massive reach, and I find many like minds. The downside is the 140 characters limit that collaboration- and I often find myself frustrated by the speed and brevity. Google Plus is a much smaller community, but I often find that interactions are productive and more enduring.

There are many ways that technology complicates our lives, but in collaboration it allows us to collaborate better and further than ever before.

The Power of Gaming- Pokemon Go

There is an ebb and flow in the attitudes and buzz around gaming in education. This week, with the release of Pokemon Go, I saw, once again, the power of gaming in action. Pokemon Go was released. Pokemon Go is an augmented reality game that allows users to interact with a Pokemon world overlaid on the real world.

My younger kids play it (10,12) of course delighting in the Pokemon they find as we drive around town. My 22-year-old son and 26-year-old nephew are also enjoying it. Reliving parts of their childhood they are interacting and discovering the hidden world around them.

Next to my house there is a park, now visiting the gazebo gives you Pokeballs and the sign is a Poke Gym. Traffic around the park has more than doubled with kids teens and adults stopping to explore the digital and the real.

My point is not to celebrate this particular game. My point is that gaming is something that appeals to the digital generation. This app makes participants move (you need 2K steps to hatch a Pomkemon egg). If done correctly it can generate learning, motivation and a sense of adventure. I can easily see a game app at a museum, sending users to find specific exhibits and discover ideas and histories. There can be a real reward but just as easily you can just have a leaderboard and levels that seem to motivate gamers. Imagine a city creating an app that provides points for each landmark, and cultural event.

Just imagine what we can do!

Writing Tech into Grants? You must read this first!

In the last week, I have been on a panel for a federal grant. I cannot and will not reveal details but I do want to share some advice. In simple terms, grant proposals are supposed to address a pressing need and suggest that there are enough planned supports that would make said action succeed.

The proposals I have been reading have done an admirable job convincing me of their capacity to do everything they said. Except integrate technology. So here are some general rules:

1. Someone needs to manage devices. If you aim to purchase student or even teacher devices, you must show that you have a system that can distribute, manage the devices, provide basic support, and maintain when needed.

2. Technology is not magic (on its own). If you buy new  technology teachers and students have to be educated about its use and supported through modeling, coaching and on-going Professional Development.

3. If technology is a major part of your grant make sure that you hire or show that you have leaders who are well versed in technology integration. In the grant proposals I have been reading, all project directors were content and school experts but nowhere did they show evidence that their professional developers knew much about technology integration.

4. Have a theory of action of why technology will make a difference. Just buying teacher devices, for example, will  NOT automatically improve student achievement. It may, but as the grant writer, you should make the connection obvious.

In short, please treat technology like you would every other aspect of the grant. Technology can be magic but ONLY if you have all the conditions to ensure success.

Are We Ready for Cyborg Ed?

Knee Replacement Vimeo

 I have been recovering from ACL surgery in the last two weeks. As I move (with difficulty) about, many passers-by notice my condition and share their own experiences. As a result, I am much more aware of the number of people who have had knee replacement surgery. The anecdotal information is informative but I was looking for a sense of the data on a US wide perspectives. Over a million operations of knee and hip replacements are conducted annually according to the CDC. If I add pacemakers, stents, and even selective plastic surgery the trend is clear. We are becoming what science fiction used to call cyborgs, a combination of man and machine. It improves our quality of life and increases our life expectancy.

Prosthesis Legs

I believe that mobile technology in the form of phones and tablets is very similar. We always have it with us and we communicate with it constantly. In fact, we have come to rely on digital tools as a way to store information (phone numbers, email addresses, calendar etc) and provide access to information that in the past needed to be looked up laboriously or just memorized. The fact is that we are becoming cyborgs not just in limbs but in our mind as well. I know some lament this development, hey I am not completely sure I like it at times. But, like it or not, it is happening. The question is, what does it mean and are we ready for it?

In the book we are currently writing, called Mind, Models, and Mentors, my colleagues (Brooks and Sayood) and I had a long discussion about the way the internet changes education. If we are truly becoming cyborgs then education has to adjust. The key is moving away from knowledge accumulation and memorization to problem-solving and searching.

"While memory remains important, it is clear that technologies (language, writing system, printing press, Internet) change the demands on human memory. What was essential a thousand years ago in order to discuss a text effectively (memory of the whole text) is potentially less critical now when we can easily refer back to texts in paper or digitally. This does not mean that students are learning (memorizing) less; instead it means that they need to memorize a different subset of knowledge linked to more complex operations and procedures." (excerpt from Brooks, Sayood, and Trainin, 2016)

I do not believe that there should be no content knowledge. The most needed tasks and information should be available in long-term memory and immediately accessible. The rest... should be accessed through search. This change is guided by three interlocking facts:
1. We have devices that allow us to be constantly connected. They are fast and comprehensive.
2. Modern knowledge is too extensive for anyone to know it all in detail.
3. Knowledge is developing and updating at increasing speeds. It makes what your Dr. learned in med school 10 years ago is now potentially obsolete or even dangerous.

As a result, the skills that our students need are the skills of searching and evaluating the quality of information available, problem-solving and self-regulation of our memory to make sure that we remember is accurate and still relevant.

The term cyborg has always been a negative one. Reality around us shows that we are becoming cyborgs, mechanically, and cognitively. This is our evolution and we must make sure that we adjust our schools to fit reality.

It's Time to Decide What's Next in Ed

Stanley Howe CC License

Over the last decade, education has developed a dual personality. One is the high stakes assessment driven culture that focuses on a narrow top-down curricular vision. It is a vestige of the 20th-century vision for education. It is organized, clear in its means and outcomes. The yardsticks are set, and we are all measured against them. After trying this way for the better part of 20 years, we can say a few things. The first is that the accountability put in place helped shine a light on educational inequities that were sometimes hidden by local reporting practices. Accountability done well showed clearly the "achievement gap" and its relationship to income and other inequalities. However, the neo-liberal expectation that exposing certain inequalities will lead to a self-correcting system through a system of rewards and punishments has failed miserably.

At the same time, educators have realized that the post-industrial economy presents new challenges and need a decidedly different educational output. The vision was not necessarily new (Dewey was right) but it was now deemed necessary not just by humanist but also by business leaders. The call for education that is creative, problem-solving oriented, and includes soft skills is now coming from all sides. The problem is that we cannot do both at the same time. At least not well.

We have tried for a while to claim that working on 21st skills will also lead to growth in test scores a-la Dr. Seuss and Jack Prelutsky (Hooray for Diffendoofer Day!). The linear nature of tests defies this logic. From an effort perspective, you get more "bang for your buck" (the buck here is time) if you focus only on tested skills than if you work on a complex wide array of outcomes many of them long term. My mentor Lee Swanson used to call it confusing the independent and dependent variables. In this case, limited measurement gives you a false sense of impact.

What I see in the field are schools trying to satisfy both personalities. Let's score high on the test with a narrow curricular vision AND be creative. The reality is that our days are too short, and both teachers and students find it very hard to pivot from a structured almost canned curriculum to creativity and soft skills and then back again.

The question is how to combine the advantages of the accountability era, namely accountability that shines a light on inequities, with 21st-century curricular goals. The answer is simple. Technology. Technology allows us to record everything students do. The need for a narrow window of time in which all students are measured on a narrow set of skills can be replaced by a flexible system that records everything that students do and tags their growing abilities. My personal work with Actively Learn is an example of how this can be achieved. But for that to work, we need to put our attention to making sure that we have the right personality.