Login to Change.org
Use Facebook to connect with friends and mobilize your social network.
Create an Account
Carl Anderson
Rochester, MN
Teacher, Artist, Parent, Technology Integration Specialist, Advocate for Student Directed Learning Environments.
Recent Activity
-
Carl commented on the article |I had an idea along the lines of a stimulus that might get some support, work to further boosting the economy, and positively impact education today that I thought I would put before this community. This post seems to be the appropriate place to air this thought. What if, rather than a stimulus bill that blindly puts government money in the hands of people or cooperations to do as they please we do it in the form of a tax credit for low income families for the purchase of laptops for their school children? Many school districts wish to become 1:1 laptop schools but struggle to find ways to afford the cost, especially the cost of maintenance. If the government paid for these computers for the families who can't afford to provide them on their own then schools would have no reason the couldn't declare themselves student provided 1:1 laptop schools. These families could have access in the evenings and weekends to the computers which would be valuable from an economic standpoint, the influx in computer sales would boost the tech sector, and schools could divert technology funding toward other needs such as professional development and teacher retention.
I am currious what others think and what ideas other people have for a potential education stimulus bill.
-
Carl commented on the article |No, no, no, no!
The solution to the problems you point out are not solved by destroying this new form of technology, they are solved by embracing it. First, name one technology that has been successfully put an end to by any civilization. We can draft policy and enforce laws that slow the spread of technologies but in the battle between status quo and technology technology always wins in the end. Schools have been very slow to embrace this form of communication or to give credibility to it a s a platform for legitimate literacy learning. Therefore, the communication that is made in these spaces is not vetted, analyzed, assessed, or given feedback on by teachers who would otherwise work to correct grammar and spelling errors (not to mention errors in rhetoric). If schools embraced this technology we would not only see this explosion of literacy and writing but the product of this explosion would be of higher quality. On the other hand, language and literacy is always evolving. Sometimes it evolves very slowly and other times it evolves in leaps and bounds. If a farmer grows plants the fields look far different than if that land were left to develop naturally. Unaided growth tends to produce results far different from the intent of architects. Perhaps we will emerge from this explosion with a whole new form of literacy that has been allowed to develop along more natural lines than established linguist and traditional literacy coaches would prefer to steer it. Such a form would be devoid of many biases such individuals would bring into the field. Perhaps those biases are unwarranted and the new literacy will have been better for schools not having embraced it early on.
ægþer ádfaru sum dæg þes brýdhlóp willælfsogoða wæs earfoþlære ríce lárhús.
-
Carl commented on the article |@Nancy
I love opening cans of worms. I do so every time I want to go fishing (please read this metaphorically here).
"I have never found it possible to be instructionally effective without building classroom community first, or teaching each group how to work together as learners."
I whole heartedly agree with this statement but I fail to see its relevance in this discussion. There are plenty of ways to build community in an online class. For many students the community building that occurs online is healthier than their social interactions in the f2f setting. In some ways community building that occurs online can be more powerful because, if done right, it requires all students to be more reflective and responsive. There is no such thing as a passive learner in an online class. Online the passive learner is an absent learner. The same thing is true both for content learning and community building activities. However, the same cannot be said of f2f settings. Passive learning there, while not idealized, is generally accepted as something that is going to happen (actually psychologically it is imperative for all our brains to take breaks from time to time).
Statements like these presuppose that online learning and online courses do not possess this element of the learning environment (or do so with diminished capacity). There are many ways to build community online. You can use threaded message boards to generate asynchronous dialog. You can utilize tools like Skype, DimDim, or Eluminate for synchronous sessions. You can craft assessments that require students to collaborate and share. You can incorporate elements of peer teaching through screencasts or vodcasts that both introduce the student to the group and make the student feel a sense of responsibility to the group for everyone's learning. You can have students work together to build projects such as virtual worlds, custom search engines, or wikis. You can require students to comment on each others blog posts (either in Moodle or some other LMS or on actual blogs they write).
One huge benefit of this shift of focus from f2f to online community building is the authentic nature of tasks like writing. Online learning has a much larger focus on formal forms of communication than f2f setting posess. When students work in these environments they constantly have to think of audience. When they engage in online learning the writing they do is purposeful and there is exponentially more of it done there than f2f.
I do like your final sentence, "I just want to think about the consequences of the change." I also feel this sentence sums up the feeling of a large majority of teachers who are either fearful or ambivalent about the changes that are afoot. Too often the thinking that is done is about the negative consequences and not the positive (though this article attempts to do the former). While I agree that there will be negative consequences of this shift I am not convinced that the negatives outweigh the positives. I am also not convinced that what we loose won't be supplemented by some other aspect of society or of people's lives. That supplement for (fill in the blank) could turn out to be a more effective tool for teaching such skills.
-
Carl commented on the article |
@Nancy
"There is, however, a critical, foundational layer of learning which includes f2f relationships with other humans. Like learning how to deal with intellectual conflict when you can't walk away from the computer. Or who is/is not trustworthy. Or why (now how) to read."
This is only true if we accept that this is part of the role of schools. Is it possible that our role is much narrower than this thought presupposes? I am not disagreeing with you but question this for myself.
-
Carl commented on the article |
There's also well-documented evidence that employers prefer people who well work in teams--isn't collaboration one of our 21st century goals? What does it mean when students learn better alone?</blockquote>
Since when does work in teams have to be syncronous and in the same environment. I teach for an online school and while my students only meet online syncronously a few times each week they are still working in teams and learning socially through message boards, SMS, wiki projects, and other places where they can collaborate online. Just as we are having a conversation here on this blog post.
Also, I have noticed that students who have been with our school longer tend to perform much better. Along with the novelty also comes a kind of disorientation as students must also learn the the learning management system while keeping up with their lessons. Once the novelty wears off the students focus on content.
-
Carl commented on the article |
While I whole heartedly support online schools and online learning initiatives and do believe the conclusions this study draws the part of me that feels the need to be held to a certain level of academic honesty wonders if this data is truly reliable. For one thing, there can never be a true comparison between these two groups for the same reason people argue against charter schools. Those who enroll in an online course are more likely either to be self motivated learners or have parents who are actively involved in their education. Both of those traits could be the reason for the success of the online courses vs traditional settings. We need to find a way to test this with a reliable control group to be sure the reason for the increase in performance is due to the delivery and not the motivation of the students.
-
Carl commented on the article |Marcella,
If you look at schooling as an investment then it is not just the taxpayers that foot the bill. The taxpayers foot the monetary capital but the students foot the time. Teachers have to sell to students just as much as they have to advocate their programs to the taxpayers. In this sense students are consumers.
-
Carl commented on the article |
"As far as I'm concerned, teachers and students collaborate on the students' learning, but it is the teacher, finally, who shapes and guides the content."
I am not sure I agree with this characterization of the relationship teacher and student have with content. Ultimately, perception and meaning of any stimuli are the direct jurisdiction of the one experiencing it. In the end the student chooses which stimuli to pay attention to. All meaning derived from whatever that student chooses to focus on happens within the student. This is why engagement ought to be the primary goal of the teacher. If a teacher is sufficiently engaging there will be no need to argue about whether or not a cell phone is present. If the content of the lesson is engaging enough either the student will not want to use the cell phone or will use it to support what they are engaged with in the class. If cell phones are a problem in a teacher's classroom it is most likely the result of disengaged students.
-
Carl commented on the article |I want to thank Clay for bringing Ira on as a guest blogger this week and thank you Ira for these fantastic posts. This one in particular I intend on sharing with the teachers I work with.
-
Carl commented on the article |The line that sticks with me from your post that I keep coming back to as I read each comment here in this thread is that most students are not successful in school. I agree with you 100% that technology is everything people have invented. This not only includes computers and books but procedural strategies for accomplishing things such as pedagogy as well. You do a nice job of bringing this to light at the end of your post. Reading through all of these comments I can't help but think of alternative pedagogies (i.e. technologies) that young people who are not successful in school are most engaged in. I used to teach in an urban alternative school where many of my students were gang members. These students were not successful in school though they did get an education. I am sorry to say that the majority of their education did not come from school teachers nor was it an education sanctioned by the school district. I also through the years have been involved in many online communities of interest. Learning occurs there all the time. Not all members of these communities were successful in school but within these communities were successful in becoming educated about certain things. There is high quality education occurring in many places that we don't consider school: boy and girl scouts, workplaces, church youth groups, 4H, Little League, gangs, internet chat rooms, YouTube, blogs, libraries, family interaction, etc. In fact, the most relevant learnin for most people happens in one of hese other places of education and not in schools.
If the goal for schools is to become the most relevant and useful place for education we need to harness the rhetorical draw of the gang, the personal significance of the family, the intrinsic nature of clubs and organizations like the Scouts and 4H, the relevance and applicability of the work place, and the openness of social media. The only way to do this is to personalize the learning experience for each student. This means that content will be as different from person to person as is the approach to teaching that content.
The other option is to look at these alternative sources of education and find a way to empower them with the same credentialing power schools have. This may be the better solution to school change but I don't think any school system is willing to give up it's monopoly on content or grant that another institution is more effective at educating certian groups of students than they are.
I will stop now, I feel my thoughts are starting to sound incoherent and slightly off topic.
