Dangerously Irrelevant

Mimi Ito says:

parents more often than not have a negative view of the role of the Internet in learning, but young people almost always have a positive one

…

Young people are desperate for learning that is relevant and part of the fabric of their social lives, where they are making choices about how, when, and what to learn, without it all being mapped for them in advance

via http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/what-teens-get-about-the-internet-that-parents-dont/273852

David Sirota says:

The pervasive media mythology tells us that the fight over the schoolhouse is supposedly a battle between greedy self-interested teachers who don’t care about children and benevolent billionaire “reformers” whose political activism is solely focused on the welfare of kids. Epitomizing the media narrative, the Wall Street Journal casts the latter in sanitized terms, reimagining the billionaires as philanthropic altruists “pushing for big changes they say will improve public schools.”

The first reason to scoff at this mythology should be obvious: It simply strains credulity to insist that pedagogues who get paid middling wages but nonetheless devote their lives to educating kids care less about those kids than do the Wall Street hedge funders and billionaire CEOs who finance the so-called reform movement. Indeed, to state that pervasive assumption out loud is to reveal how utterly idiotic it really is, and yet it is baked into almost all of today’s coverage of education politics.

via http://www.salon.com/2013/03/11/getting_rich_off_of_schoolchildren

Ethan Zuckerman says:

If we conclude that civics is in crisis, there’s a hard question to answer: what would we do to help students prepare to become more effective citizens? William Galston reviewed much of the literature on the effectiveness of civic education a decade ago and suggests that more civic education is probably not the answer: “For three decades, the scholarly consensus has been that formal, classroom-based civic education has no significant effect on civic knowledge.” In fact, we’re so bad at teaching civics in the classroom that, “remarkably, the informal civic education that occurs in such non-civics courses as English literature may be more effective than civic education as currently taught.”

via http://dmlcentral.net/blog/ethan-zuckerman/civics-crisis-or-just-changing-its-shape

David Warlick says:

The fallacy of competitive education is its obsession with remembered right answers. The fallacy of right answers is that today success depends less on right answers and more on finding good answers and using them to accomplish meaningful goals. What does the game of school do to children who are more inclined to find and invent good answers than memorize correct answers?

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As long as we race [to the top], scoring points by teaching the same answers for the same tests to every child, then we’re perfectly preparing a generation for its own history.

via http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/?p=3967

Iowa high school student Jack Hostager says:

Are you going to do what makes you look good or work for a system that does what’s best for students? Are we going to test the daylights out of me to get our bar a little bigger than everyone else’s on some national assessment data graph, or are we going to move towards a system that rewards meaningful learning and develops critical, concerned, productive citizens?

Textbooks are unbelievably dull and dense … no one should scratch their head at students’ lack of interest in reading when schools require students to read the most uninteresting writing that exists day after day

Iowa high school student Jack Hostager via http://listentostudents.blogspot.com/2013/01/90-theses-of-textbooks.html

It’s hard to look back over the last four decades and find ways that education technology has made deep, lasting changes on schooling. It’s also hard to imagine a future where we don’t depend upon emerging technologies to shape learning across our lifetimes.

Justin Reich via http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/edtechresearcher/2013/02/ten_tough_questions_for_digital_learning_day.html

Gary Stager says:

There are three competing visions of educational computing. Each bestows agency on an actor in the educational enterprise. We can use classroom computers to benefit the system, the teacher, or the student. Data collection, drill-and-practice test-prep, computerized assessment, or monitoring Common Core compliance are examples of the computer benefitting the system. “Interactive” white boards, presenting information or managing whole-class simulations are examples of computing for the teacher. In this scenario, the teacher is the actor, the classroom a theatre, the students the audience and the computer is a prop.

The third vision is a progressive one. The personal computer is used to amplify human potential. It is an intellectual laboratory and vehicle for self-expression that allows each child to not only learn what we’ve always taught, perhaps with greater efficacy, efficiency or comprehension. The computer makes it possible for students to learn and do in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. This vision of computing democratizes educational opportunity and supports what Papert and Turkle call epistemological pluralism. The learner is at the center of the educational experience and learns in their own way.

Too many educators make the mistake of assuming a false equivalence between “technology” and its use. Technology is not neutral. It is always designed to influence behavior. Sure, you might point to an anecdote in which a clever teacher figures out a way to use a white board in a learner-centered fashion or a teacher finds the diagnostic data collected by the management system useful. These are the exception to the rule.

While flexible high-quality hardware is critical, educational computing is about software because software determines what you can do and what you do determines what you can learn. In my opinion the lowest ROI comes from granting agency to the system and the most from empowering each learner. You might think of the a continuum that runs from drill/testing at the bottom; through information access, productivity, simulation and modeling; with the computer as a computational material for knowledge construction representing not only the greatest ROI, but the most potential benefit for the learner.

Piaget reminds us,“To understand is to invent,” while our mutual colleague Seymour Papert said, “If you can use technology to make things, you can make more interesting things and you can learn a lot more by making them.”

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kindergarteners could build, program and choreograph their own robot ballerinas by utilizing mathematical concepts and engineering principles never before accessible to young children. Kids express themselves through filmmaking, animation, music composition and collaborations with peers or experts across the globe. 5th graders write computer programs to represent fractions in a variety of ways while understanding not only fractions, but also a host of other mathematics and computer science concepts used in service of that understanding. An incarcerated 17 year-old dropout saddled with a host of learning disabilities is able to use computer programming and robotics to create “gopher-cam,” an intelligent vehicle for exploring beneath the earth, or launch his own probe into space for aerial reconnaissance. Little boys and girls can now make and program wearable computers with circuitry sewn with conductive thread while 10th grade English students can bring Lady Macbeth to life by composing a symphony. Soon, you be able to email and print a bicycle. Computing as a verb is the game-changer.

Used well, the computer extends the breadth, depth and complexity of potential projects. This in turn affords kids with the opportunity to, in the words of David Perkins, “play the whole game.” Thanks to the computer, children today have the opportunity to be mathematicians, novelists, engineers, composers, geneticists, composers, filmmakers, etc… But, only if our vision of computing is sufficiently imaginative.

via http://www.joebower.org/2013/02/technology-is-not-neutral.html

At what point do we stop talking about digital literacy and recognize that people who cannot apply their literacy in digital situations aren’t really literate any more?

David Wees via https://plus.google.com/109984287766356192435/posts/NzZYBxrfDit

We thrive when we learn according to ourselves; we wither when we learn at the beck and call of others. We build community and sow trust when we protect others’ rights to learn as they are; we throttle community and reap mistrust when we insist that others learn as we do – or as we teach.

When we make with others we tacitly discover not only our own weirdnesses – and not only others’ weirdnesses – but also our ability to value ourselves and others for our weirdness and their weirdness.

Weirdness is a place we carry together, in idiosyncratic contrast and invitation to one another to appreciate, understand, and affirm how we learn and express ourselves. Appreciating and sharing weirdness is making stuff – including writing – with students. Appreciating and sharing weirdness is connected learning.

The most dangerous thing we do when we comply with the standardization of schools is to assume that we and our kids will survive it – that we can get through one more lesson. One more test. One more year. One more education. One more job. One more life.

We are not all of us one more life to get through. We are weird, until we are not. We can grow up to be ourselves, until we cannot. We can learn anything we want, until we learn to believe we cannot.

I don’t know what to do about failing schools. I don’t know how to argue someone who wants a standardized education for financial security and social mobility (even though that kind of education is not a guarantee of either anymore). I do know how to teach and learn as if what I want to learn will help me happily live the life I lead. I know that is a privileged stance, and I desperately want help in unpacking how it can become a universal one for all of us in all schools. If my privilege right now lets me make these wishes and do such work, then that is what my privilege should be for – for making it safe to be weird and alive and learning.

Chad Sansing via http://digitalis.nwp.org/site-blog/learning-be-weird-educon-reflection/4616