Dangerously Irrelevant

One of the largest studies ever done of United States classrooms (over 2,500 elementary classrooms) has found that

• elementary students spend over 90% of their time working alone or listening to the teacher (rather than, for example, working collaboratively with peers);
• most kids had a healthy classroom ‘emotional climate’ but that only about 1 in 7 kids had a consistently high-quality ‘instructional climate’ all three years studied; and
• the typical teacher scored only 3.6 out of seven points for ‘richness
  of instructional methods,’ and 3.4 for providing ‘evaluative feedback’
  to students on their work.

The study’s findings are reported in this week’s Science magazine.

Will Richardson says he’s
stuck. I say we need
a plan. Karl Fisch says we
have a pretty good anticipatory set. Will says what next?

We need action on multiple fronts: schools, universities, policymakers,
business people, local communities. But we can’t start moving without having some
important conversations. So with that in mind…

Karl and I are working with XPLANE to
update the Did You
Know? video because it seems to resonate with folks. We’re going to update
some of the facts, reframe some of the slides, turn down some of the global
alarmism, and turn up the visual attractiveness several notches. Our goal is to
make a version 2 that resonates with folks even more than the first one. But
we need your help.

Imagine that you’ve just showed Did You
Know? to an audience of educators (or business people or
politicians or community members). What questions do you ask to
start the conversation about what’s next? In other words, we don’t want people
to just watch the video, say Wow!, and then continue to do nothing.
What questions should we be asking at the end to facilitate people
talking about and moving toward the creation of 21st century school
environments?

Here are some possibilities:

• What should we expect high school graduates to be able to do in this new
  era?
• What should we be doing to help K-12 educators make the transition to this
  new world?
• How can we tap into students’ existing knowledge and skills in this
  area?
• What kinds of supports are schools going to need to become 21st century
  learning organizations and how are we going to provide them?

I’ll stop here because I don’t want to shape your thinking any further, but
you get the idea. Please submit your ideas for good
end-of-video questions, as well as any other suggestions you have about this
project, as comments on this blog post or on Karl’s post. Thanks for
making a contribution to this important endeavor!

My contribution to Stop Cyberbullying Day is going to be threefold. First, this quick quiz:

Online Poll Using WebSurveyor

Second, although my graphic design skills aren’t the greatest, I made some badges that can be used by others as desired:

• Stop Cyberbullying images

Third, I created an online presentation that outlines the basic legal parameters for dealing with student or employee cyberbullying incidents:

• Administrator’s Guide to Cyberbullying (23 minutes)

I made it quickly, so it’s not as polished as it could be, but I hope that it’s helpful for school administrators and other technology leaders across the country. The presentation goes into detail about the six cyberbullying cases that have resulted in a judicial decision, describes why five of those cases have gone against the school officials, and then outlines some other options that schools have for dealing with electronic bullying or harassment. [FYI, the presentation is a modified version of the longer presentation I gave on this topic last December. Comments or suggestions regarding the presentation are most welcome. I can revise and repost it easily.]

I’m looking forward to seeing other folks’ contributions to Stop Cyberbullying Day and am hopeful that we’ll see a significant flurry of activity on this topic today. Thanks, Andy, for this great idea.

Update: here’s another case that went against the school.

Minnesota is used to being at the top. Our accolades include being one of the best states in the country in which to raise a family, being at the top on child and adult health measures, and being one of the highest states in terms of adult educational attainment. The state consistently is at the top when it comes to academic achievement on national and international tests as well. But when it comes to K-12 technology we’re not doing so well.

Last year Education Week gave Minnesota a D when it came to K-12 technology policy and practice. This year its annual Technology Counts issue bumps Minnesota up to a C but notes that the state is still below the national average. Here are some of the relevant tables from the Minnesota report (click on each for a larger image):

You can see from the charts below that we lag the nation as a whole when it comes to closing the digital divide (click on each for a larger image). On average, our poor and/or minority students have less access to instructional computers than do similar students in other states.

How did your state do? Visit Education Week to find out.

Andy Carvin at Learning Now has declared this Friday, March 30, to be Stop Cyberbullying Day. I encourage everyone to read Andy’s post and join in. Share a story, take a stand, but don’t be silent. You’ll see a post from me on this topic on Friday for sure.

Also, I made a few images for people’s web sites or blogs. They’re not the best but feel free to use them as desired.

As promised, here is the link to the Women of the Web 2.0 podcast and chat transcript from March 20, 2007:

• Women of the Web 2.0 Administrator Supershow

Thanks to all who joined us, including Pete Reilly (who was a last-minute but very welcome addition) and everyone who participated in the quite-active chat space.

For those of you who are interested, here is my "money quote":

• Scott McLeod’s money quote (responding to a question from Vicki Davis; 1:44 mp3)

I believe we’re scheduled to rejoin the Women of the Web 2.0 on May 1 for a follow-up session. I’m looking forward to it!

As director of CASTLE, the nation’s only center dedicated to the technology leadership needs of K-12 school administrators, I’ve been named a finalist (again) for the cable industry’s Leaders in Learning Awards. I’ve got tremendous competition in the General Excellence category but keep your fingers crossed for me!

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

I found this map of Ray Sims’ personal learning environment via a link from Stephen Downes (thanks, Stephen!). It’s a neat idea. I’m guessing that it would be pretty informative to ask K-12 teachers and administrators to diagram their own personal learning environments and then have some discussion around some key questions:

• What sources do we tap into for our own professional learning?
• What overlaps are there between staff members?
• What gaps are there within our school organization (i.e., what learning channels should we be monitoring but aren’t)?
• What are some strategies for staying on top of the incredible wealth of information that is out there?
• How do we learn about new learning channels?
• How are we modeling ‘lifelong learning’ for our students?
• and so on…

This is cool. I may try to create my own map and see what it looks like. How about you? What does your personal learning environment look like?

[cross-posted at The Gate]

In case you haven’t been following the issue, the federal government
can’t make up its mind regarding Internet filtering. On the one hand,
government attorneys vigorously argued for Internet filtering
mechanisms as
part of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004:

A library’s use of
filtering software to block material covered by CIPA is constitutional.
The district court itself found that filtering software is a reasonably
effective way to block pornographic material, and that such material falls
outside of a public library’s traditional collection boundaries.

The district court’s finding that filtering software erroneously blocks
some constitutionally protected speech does not undermine the reasonableness
of their use. (see http://tinyurl.com/2omvsp)

In contrast, federal attorneys have attacked software filters as burdensome and ineffective in their attempts to defend the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which keeps getting blocked by federal courts:

The court of appeals also erred in holding that filtering software
is a sufficient alternative to COPA’s mandatory screening requirement. Filtering
software is not nearly as effective as COPA’s screening requirement in shielding
minors from commercial domestic pornography on the Web. Filtering software
is voluntary, while COPA’s screening requirement is mandatory. Filtering
software also blocks some sites that are not harmful; it fails to block
some sites that are harmful; it can be expensive for parents to purchase;
and it quickly becomes outdated. Congress also did not view mandatory screening
and blocking software as an either or choice. It mandated screening and
encouraged the use of blocking software as well. That combined approach
is far more effective than the use of voluntary blocking software alone. (see http://tinyurl.com/322qnc)

Huh?

I just finished reading Everything
Bad Is Good For You. The author, Steven Johnson, makes a quite-convincing
case that today's popular culture and media (video games, television, Internet,
movies), rather than being 'cheap pleasures that pale beside the intellectual
riches of yesterday,' are much more cognitively complex than what we had
available to us just a decade or two ago. If you haven't yet read this book, I
highly recommend it. Kottke.org
has a short blurb on the book along with a number of excellent links to other
resources and commentary.

One of my favorite parts of the book is at the beginning. First Johnson
quotes Marshall
McLuhan:

The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period
whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who acquired the patterns of earlier
media, whatever they may happen to be.

Johnson then hypothesizes what critics might have said if video games
preceded books rather than the other way around:

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the
long-standing tradition of game playing – which engages the child in a vivid,
three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes,
navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements – books are simply a
barren string of words on the page.

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years
engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and
exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him- or herself in
a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new
‘libraries’ that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities
are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and
socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to
their peers.

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that
they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any
fashion – you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. This risks
instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though
they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active,
participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger
generation are learning to ‘follow the plot’ instead of learning to lead.

As Johnson notes, these new forms of communication, participation, and
learning have worth. They're not the vast intellectual wastelands that cultural
critics often claim them to be. Reading still has a great deal of value, as Johnson clearly
states in other parts of his book, but so do these other forms of media. We might sometimes wish that the
subject matter or content matter of these media forms were different – for
example, I personally wish that some video games weren't so violent and gory – but the
bottom line is that the intellectual complexity of popular media is much greater
than before. We would be better served to tap into the affordances of these new
media forms rather than criticizing them simply because they're new and
different.

I give this one 4 higlighters.