A Sunday Rant

Here's an article from The Washington Post that distracted me from relaxing, this morning. Read it and come back when you have a few minutes.

Bill Gates appeared before a gathering of governors and told them that American high schools are obsolete. I agree with him, and one of my favorite lines these days revolves around the idea that a teacher from 1905 can walk into a modern school and find his/her way around. Bill Gates is opening a high school in Philadelphia that will be chock-full of tomorrow's technology. A lot of it is administrative, geared toward efficiency. No surprise there, I guess. They're working on portal-things for the kids, though, and that might be neat and may even be social.

Other points raised by the article, however, raised my hackles. For one, the concentration on the number of American students who graduate college is something that's bothered me for a long time. See, well, every single one of my podcasts. I may get kicked out of suburban public education for saying this, but shouldn't our economy offer other avenues toward personal success besides college?

This kind of status inflation has widened the gap in this country. While college is a noble and valid goal for a lot of students, we need to face the fact that not every career requires a stop in the ivory tower. Casting college as a ticket out of disadvantaged communities could also be asking public schools in those communities, and the colleges they feed, to make far too many compromises. Meanwhile, students in suburban districts all-too-often see a college degree as a birth right. Every challenging suburban teacher has fielded the question from an angry parent. How dare the high school exercise a more rigorous curriculum that asks more of the student (and therefore is more likely to jeopardize college admission) when the degree that matters, now, is a BA/BS? Who do we think we are?

One of the governors at the meeting cited a recent study "proving" that a rigorous curriculum is all that kids need. I've only read about this study, but I really want to read it now. What do they mean by "rigorous", and what's the measurement? Does an in-depth, repetitive, drill-and-practice march through the algebra textbook result in higher algebra test scores? Sure. Does it increase civic participation? Does it translate into any sort of responsible or ethical use of information or social software? Does it really contribute to personal or national economic success?

And we all know the dirty secret. When you control for everything, socio-economics is all that kids need. Traditional teaching and measurement, and traditional "rigorous" curricula, are only relevant to certain socio-economic groups. They are only understood to be part of the formula for success by students who come to school ready to learn. They will never deliver on the promise to be a ticket out of disadvantaged communities, because they will never be relevant to a student who experiences more strife on the way to school than the high-socio-economic kid experiences in his/her entire life.

These governors are setting up to write A Nation at Risk all over again. To them, it's about America's standing in the world. It's about how our test scores, when taken by a wide array of students, match up to test scores in other countries, where students are hand-selected to take such tests. It's about nationalism.

Good ol' math and science even make an appearance in the article. When Sputnik launched and we embarked on a crusade to make mathematicians and physicists out of all of our students, the only important result was a stunning drop in the number of college students majoring in physics. You can also find at least a dozen academics who believe such crusades to be so gendered in their terms and goals as to shut women out of the fight. Hence, fewer science degrees for women.

What a way to start a Sunday!

World Wind ... Oh my!

I've been wasting my morning playing with ... err ... R&D'ing with Nasa's latest version of World Wind. My goodness. If you aren't yet familiar with this satellite imagery retrieval application, go check it out. Now.

I can't do it justice, so I'll let this article from Wired magazine explain it to you.

Click here to visit the application's home page. There's a really big WOW!-factor on this one, so get ready ...

Integrative Learning

Listen as I wish my American listeners a belated "Happy Presidents' Day." Everyone else ... Happy 2/21.

A report from the Carnegie Foundation, along with the Association of American Colleges and Universities, gets me talking about integrative learning (again), but also sends me back into my graduate school textbooks.

Also, for a much-needed practical interlude, I think out loud about Pocket PC's ... one-to-one computing on a shoestring?

Here's the report.

Click here for the podcast.

Open Source at Stigmergic

Rob Wall over at Stigmergicweb recently released a very interesting podcast discussing open source in education. The show notes have some valuable links.

He talks about OpenAdmin, the open source student information/management system. Unfortunately, one of the byproducts of the accountability movement is the spawning of an SIS/SMS industry that guarantees that their products can produce any arcane, cryptic report demanded by our state capital. A proposal to install an open source SIS wouldn't get far in my district--perhaps my entire state--unless there were a couple of full-time staff members, and maybe a DBA, tucked inside of the download. It's a shame, because we pay a lot of money to run an Oracle-based system that frustrates us to no end. And we have to pay more for any customization we need.

Unless it's for a state report.

One big hurtin' head ...

My head hurts after this podcast. Who would've thought that playing with Grokker would be so ... un-American? ... so corrupting? Hierarchical file sysems are the opium of the people!

See for yourself:

• The Brain
• Grokker
• Inspiration

Here's a direct link to the podcast.

A linguist weighs in ...

Geoffrey Nunberg, one of my favorite voices on NPR, has written an article about "information literacy" for the New York Times. Why the quotes? He discusses the term itself, as well as the idea. He brings up some nice points, particularly that "information literacy" is so wide-ranging a skillset as to be nearly impossible to quantify. He's also introduced me a to a nifty new term: "cognitive miser."

The article dovetails nicely with my last podcast, and with some of the other ideas expressed here. One conclusion: misinformation is everywhere, and people don't tend to dig unless the issue is of personal or economic importance to themselves.

Read the article here (free registration required).

My teacher, myself.

I'm back after a bit of a break. Bear with me as a I rediscover my sealegs.

In this podcast, I explore the idea of being self-taught in the dawning era of information artistry. Where does self-teaching fit, and what are the dangers? Also, how can courseware like Moodle help to fill in the gaps?

Here's a direct link.

"Web-enabled Learning"

I like that term better than "e-learning" or "virtual schooling." It describes a whole spectrum of activities--from simple web pages to complement brick-and-mortar classes, to full-blown online courses.

Online courses have been in the professional press lately. Branson, Colorado, in particular. Students in online courses do not always measure up, apparently. There seem to be two issues at work, here. The teaching and learning that's occurring may not be sound. Or, the measurement isn't sound. Or, a bit of both.

A quick look at Branson's courses proves one point: a student working on his/her own through the Branson photography elective, for example, has no guidance on experiencing the information in a social context. There doesn't seem to be a social dimension to the course at all. Compared to an online system like Moodle ... well, we'll save that for another day. Hopefully, the core courses at Branson are not built on the tutorial model.

Even if there were learning in a social context, we'd probably still be talking about the measurement, and whether or not it's appropriate to judge the effectiveness of web-enabled learning through a traditional assessment. We've got to remember that traditional assessments are tied to a traditional classroom experience. Let's face it--standardized tests represent a measurement of learning in a certain environment that presents approximated experiences. Web-enabled learning occurs within a totally different (and more or less mediated, depending on the technology used) environment, with experiences that, if properly designed, are more authentic explorations of information.

There's a podcast on the way that'll expand on this. I'll be talking about being self-taught, and what that means in an era of social software. I've been down with a flu-like thing this week, so I'm a little delayed.

More on Paradigms

More on paradigms during this morning's commute ... This time, I talk details about the industrial model, scientific management and something about The Simpsons. There's some history here, as well.

Here's a direct link to the podcast.

Teaching and Learning in the Conceptual Age: Metadata

This is the first in a series of short entries on the changing role of education at the dawning Conceptual Age. As the Information Age closes, the very nature and value of information is changing as quickly as the tools used to access, store and index it. Today's students are natives to a world of social software and an enormous inflation in the value of data. Educator's, however, are immigrants to this world.

Metadata

My first experience with the concept of metadata was in the late 1990's, when I worked with our county mapping office on a project to introduce ArcView GIS to social studies, science and mathematics classes. One of cartographers discussed the need to develop standards in GIS metadata due to the recent (then) flood of mapping projects. Without improved metadata, he said, important projects would be lost or misinterpreted. It went over our heads. (Our project, incidentally, eventually withered.)

Metadata is commonly understood as "data about data." Any layer of data sitting atop other data, and serving to categorize or otherwise explain it, is metadata. MP3 tags and HTTP-headers are good examples of metadata. There are more obvious examples: a table of contents, a library card catalogue, a glossary. "Data about data," however, does not convey the power of metadata to create patterns and associations. It would be better to say, perhaps, that metadata is information about data.

This is an important distinction. One contributor to the Future of the Internet, a recent report on the results of a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey, bemoaned:

The dissemination of information will increasingly become the dissemination of drivel. As more and more ‘data’ is posted on the internet, there will be increasingly less ‘information.’

The contributor may have been referring more to "conclusions" and "analyses," but the point is no less sharp. If we add conclusion and analysis to this discussion, then we arrive, perhaps, at the following:

Metadata, when layered over data, facilitates analysis, which leads to conclusions.

Conversations about metadata in education typically revolve around the programming and development of learning modules for courseware packages--a very specialized niche of educators. Though educators barter in metadata in the classroom every single day, if not every minute, they rarelly recognize what it is, let alone the power it has to shape content and the importance it will have to our students in the real world.


Teaching Metadata

In teaching the concept of metadata, then, we are teaching students to work with and even create patterns of information. We may begin by developing some "enduring understandings" about the relationship between data and metadata. Here are a few off the top of my head, with some lesson ideas:

• Meaning is subject to context (as defined in metadata) and is not inherent to a piece of data--there are no facts. To explore this idea, students will take a line from each of three conversations that they have heard within a 24 hour period. Given these three lines, students will create a new believable conversation that does not have any relation to the original three conversations.
  

• Metadata can create relationships between data, and thus create meaning. Given three web sites, students will write a paragraph that describes a relationship among all three of them. The more disparate the web sites are, the better.

• Data, if rearranged under different metadata, can have a different impact. Given a popular magazine, students will create a new table of contents that rearranges the articles into meaningful categories.

Some of these ideas are old hat when it comes to information literacy and critical thinking skills. The difference is that these skills become more and more important for success and even daily living with each passing day.


Conclusion

We should admit that most of American education has given lip service to the issue of information literacy. We assert that we are addressing information literacy outcomes whenever we assign a project that involves research. However, we are nearing a point in time at which our disciplines--long the difference between teachers in secondary education, and between secondary and primary education teachers--are not as important as the skills necessary to research and learn.

Teachers need to begin to ask themselves: "What's important for my students to know and be able to do?" If we are truly honest about the answer to that question, then even some of the tallest pillars of content begin to tremble. What is more important: to know the Pythagorean Theorem, or to be able to make wise decisions in the marketplace? Is it better to know the outcomes of America's 19th Century conflicts, or to know how to determine fact from fiction in the polling place? Is there some answer in between, some new metadata that can help us to see important relationships among existing content, and between content areas?

Modern curriculum traces its roots to the old Carnegie unit. It imposes irrational and overly-partisan borders on top of the intellectual landscape. The very need for metadata, however, proves that information has no permanent state. It is mutable. Its relationships are often unpredictable. Curriculm design must proceed from the assumption that all information is related, not compartmentalized.

Data-driven Decision Making

Driving in to work for this podcast--my mood's a little better, and my wheels are turning on the potential of curriculum mapping software to facilitate better data-driven decision making. My district is beginning to have conversations about deploying a web portal to blend curriculum development, lesson planning, student assessment and analysis of achievement against state standards. Big Brother, or Just What We Need? Either way, it's a paradigm shift. Somehow, I tie it all back to open source and social software.

I'm finding my commute to be a good time for podcasting (and to avoid other dictation that I should be doing). The downside for you--I'm talking through a lot things for the first time and may not always come to a sound conclusion. The podcasts are likely to be a little raw.

Here's a direct link to the 'cast.

Drivin' and Thinkin'

This week on a very special episode of One Big Head ...

Rambling down I295. Is social software combining with "egocasting" to have an unintended isolating effect? In making connections, are we actually shutting out important stimuli? Will Steve Perry and Kenny Loggins ever work together again? Will I make it home alive?

Warning: raw, convoluted thought ahead.

Click on the entry title to listen.