I’m struggling to post the image, but here’s the link:

http://lh5.ggpht.com/abramsv/SBqZqido3WI/AAAAAAAAP_w/hoU2E2PwhB0/s1600-h/schipol_fly.jpg

Part of Federman’s talk gives a very brief history of media, including how the first mass media was media for Catholic Mass.  Media for Mass led to media for the masses.  He goes from their to Gutenberg’s press through a series of steps to bring us to the Internet.

A key point was the evolution of the movement of people and ideas.  Reframing his ideas got me thinking that the next societal revolution may be moving interactive facsimiles of ourselves around the world.  If that’s right, the consequences for how we live our lives and how we learn are profound.

And I think it needs to be right.

I’ve pondered for a long time how folks who think of themselves as the most scientifically literate in the world justify their typically huge ecological footprints.  An experience at the year’s Geological Society of America annual conference highlighted the issue for me.  It was in Houston in October.  The temperatures were in the high 80s.  Jim Hansen, the eminent climate researcher, was a keynote speaker.  The auditorium was filled with scientists who had flown from all over the world to participate in this meeting.  The auditorium was also probably about 65 degrees F.

Hansen’s legacy can probably justifiy his world travel.  That is, his work helps us understand better what to do because it is both well done and widely known.  For most of the other thousands of people at this meeting (myself definitely included), I have to wonder about the balance of costs and benefits.  I like to think my work is about helping to build understanding of the social and natural world so that we can live purposeful, useful lives that make the world a better place.

Fundamental to that, I strongly believe, is using less stuff and especially burning less stuff.  If we’re routinely hopping on jets that burn scores of tons of fuel to get us to our professional meetings to work in hotels and conference centers that are absurdly oppositional to the climate of their region, are we offsetting that by giving and going to presentations and chatting with our colleagues in the bar?

So, how does that relate to the title of this post?  Well, conferences really are often great places for professional development.  You get to talk with the people in the world who are experts in your field and that likely makes you better in your field.  But I think the cost is too high.  It’s not sustainable.

As technologies like Second Life, iChat, and Skype mature, we become able to interact with our colleagues at a distance.  With Skype, iChat and and other sorts of conferencing software you can, right now, host conference sessions and do them very well.  The most valued things that go on at conferences is often the hallway and cocktail lounge one on one and small group interactions.  Second Life can simulate that reasonably well and gets better at it all the time.

If we think about how the economy has evolved, the winners have typically been those who can move things that people care about.  Moving agriculture products to market; moving materials to and from manufacturing facilities; moving people to wherever it is they wish to go and moving  ideas about has driven much productivity in our history.  We moved from moving people and things as key in the last century to moving information in the new millenium.

Now we’re on the cusp of being able to move representatives of ourselves to anywhere in the world (with highspeed Internet access) and to control the actions of those representatives as they interact with people and their facsimiles.  Now, that’s not energy neutral.  Server farms are huge energy consumers, but sending those virtual representatives around the world surely takes far, far less energy than moving the real people around.

So, buy some stock in Second Life… and think about what it means for how people learn and teach in a time when our students have always had Google and IM at their disposal.

I’m now reflecting on it a little over a year after The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back.

Our affair started with a little innocent fooling around while I was in college.  Take an education class or two, teach a lesson here and there.  Then it intensified with student teaching.  As a physics teacher I got to play with toys in front of an audience!  And the audience, at least some of it, really seemed to like it!  And some times I got that special rush that comes with seeing the light bulb come on.

That feeling, the feeling of kids “getting it,” is what I imagine a hit of heroin might be like.  The shiver that ran down my spine; that look of appreciation and understanding; and especially when a kid could do something worthwhile that he or she couldn’t do before.

It turns out I was being deceived and deceiving myself at almost every turn.  In my last few years as a professor, I routinely had course evaluations telling me that mine was the best class they’d ever taken.  But I also routinely had students weeping in my office, unfairly dealing with my love’s capricious heart; unfairly dealing with the reality that, on its face, teaching is simply a bad idea; and unfairly dealing with the fickleness of who evaluates you.

It seems that at the ends of the continuum, the system works pretty well.  In the early grades, I learned to read and write and add and subtract.   In graduate school, I learned to analyze and craft an argument (and, I think, to read and write much better).  In between the ends I learned a great deal, but most of that learning came by doing and you don’t really do things that matter in classroom settings.

You mostly sit still.

Thus, most of us leave formal schooling knowing how to sit still, and to read and write and there isn’t much else that most of us know.  We’ve all been taught about geometry, evolution and the Civil War.  We’ve been taught many of these things many, many times.  But if you scratch through the surface understandings, you won’t find much underneath.  In spite of being taught the so-called scientific method over and over and over again, few adults think scientifically.  In spite of being taught over and over again about diet and exercise most of us are fat.

I’d learned in graduate school to look critically at the system and at the individuals within it.  For most of my twenty years in teaching, I’d not only been passionate about teaching, but also about the study of teaching and learning.  That study led me to understand that global warming had led glacial change to exceed academic change and, therefore, it was time for me to change direction.

I’d worked for most of my twenty years in the profession trying to make schools better.   Joining the faculty at a new charter school, I wished to make better schools.  I had an epiphany there that led me to want to make something better than schools.  And that epiphany ended my twenty-year romance with teaching.

And left me feeling alone in my new paradigm.

Standing there, in a room with 25 teenagers, trying to get them to think about why convection matters,*  it hit me that teaching is a fundamentally bad idea.  I don’t mean (just) a bad idea for me.  I mean a bad idea.

Put aside for a moment what you know about schools and focus on how you came to understand the things you understand most deeply and remember too what you know about kids.  Now, imagine someone suggesting the following:

Hey!  I’ve got a great idea!  Why don’t we put 25 teenagers in room together for an hour and have them listen to a single adult tell them about the Magna Carta!  And then, have them move down the hall and listen to someone else tell them about parabolas!  And then how heating causes expansion!  Isn’t that a great idea!  We could have them do something like this hour after hour after hour, day after day after day, year after year!  We could put 2000 fifteen to eighteen year-olds in a building!

Clearly, that’s just not a good idea.  I think I realized that when I was a teenager, but had managed to suppress that realization until I was faced with the realities of school in a new way.  I’m convinced that we’ll look back in another 20 or 30 years and be shocked that we did this to damn near everybody, much as we look back now on the horrors of segregation in America 30 and more years ago.

So, the affair is over and I’m trying to figure out how to move on.  I still have the things I learned from years of studying the system.  The creative destruction of my conceptual framework is both creative and destructive.  I’m saddened by my loss, but hopeful about the future.

I raise my question about what to do next in a way clearly derived from the way the system has made me think – an SAT analogy question:

Typewriters are to computers as schools are to: ________________.

I have ideas about how to complete the analogy, but I can’t do it alone.  I need partners in my paradigm.  Who will join me?

*Yes, convection really matters.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

Barry Schwartz lays out a compelling argument on how the affluent are afflicted by too much choice.  He describes the problem of having too many choices for salad dressing, jeans and cell phones.  And more importantly in medical care.  And when to marry and have kids.  And how to save for retirement.

Historically, we didn’t have conspicuous choices about any of these things.

Schwartz also briefly touches on the problem of having no choice. That’s not the focus of the talk as it’s not the problem of the affluent folks he’s talking about and to.  Americans, generally, have too many choices in a lot of things.

In situations without choice, Schwartz notes, we’re miserable but we can blame the world for our misery.  In situations with too much choice, if the choice doesn’t meet our expectations, we blame ourselves.

In schools, we have the problem of too much choice compounded by the problem of not enough choice.

We have effectively no choice about what to teach — a New York State Earth science teacher must teach the content on the Earth Science Regents Examination.

On the other hand, the array of materials and methods to help us teach more effectively can lead to either analysis paralysis or more straightforward disappointment.

It also seems that if we want kids to learn this stuff, we have to teach them in a class on the stuff, even though we know that it typically doesn’t yield durable understandings. (Watch Malcolm Gladwell’s TED Talk and consider the need for extra chunky educational approaches (and consider how Gladwell’s talk is seemingly in direct contradiction to Schwartz’s)).

So, we have no choice on either the content or the the fact that we’re supposed to make something like 25 kids at a time understand it in roughly 180 forty minute blocks (plus, in New York State an additional 1200 minutes of lab time).  But we’ve got scads of choices on materials and methods we use within those constraints.

We are stuck between no choice and too much choice — what to do?

We want neither to maximize nor minimize choice but rather to optimize it.  As we go about the work of our grant, we need to consider how to make our materials and programs to be not only the best choice to fit their niche, but also the easiest choice to make and a choice that leads to further options that are both manageable and desirable.

We want to make some choices for our teachers and provide heuristic and logarithmic ways to help them make other choices from bounded sets of choices — and still allow for their own creativity to enrich the project and their teaching.

A choice we’re making is that it makes sense to use the local to understand the global.  We assume that participants in the project have made that choice too.

We need to:

• Create and/or compile a set of conceptual and technological tools that help students and teachers learn about their local Earth system science (and to do so with the collaboration of teachers).
• Create a scaffolded approach to move outward from the local.  The emerging database should be a central part of this.
• Remain ever flexible and able to respond to what we learn from our work and our collaborators.
• Describe and teach how big ideas meshes with the need to optimize choice.

What kinds of choices do you, as a teacher, want help in making?  What kinds of choices do you want to make without much input?  What else are you thinking?

An aside:  If you only listen to the audio of this talk, you miss several amusing visual aids (but it’s still good).

Note that I’ve blogged about related issues before as part of Blog Against Theocracy. I hope I had something new today.

It looks to me that Reiss was very unreasonably pushed out.  The people who did the pushing, I’m guessing, didn’t actually read the text of the talk.

Here’s an excerpt:

Many scientists, and some science educators, fear that consideration of creationism or intelligent design in a science classroom legitimises them. For example, the excellent book Science, Evolution, and Creationism published by the US National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine asserts “The ideas offered by intelligent design creationists are not the products of scientific reasoning. Discussing these ideas in science classes would not be appropriate given their lack of scientific support”.

I agree with the first sentence but disagree with the second. Just because something lacks scientific support doesn’t seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson. When I was taught physics at school, and taught it extremely well in my view, what I remember finding so exciting was that we could discuss almost anything providing we were prepared to defend our thinking in a way that admitted objective evidence and logical argument.

In an interesting exception that proves the rule, I recall one of our advanced level chemistry teachers scoffing at a fellow student who sat with a spoon in front of her while Uri Geller maintained he could bend viewers’ spoons. I was all for this approach. After all, I reasoned, surely the first thing was to establish if the spoon bent (it didn’t for her) and if it did, then start working out how.

So when teaching evolution, there is much to be said for allowing students to raise any doubts they have (hardly a revolutionary idea in science teaching) and doing one’s best to have a genuine discussion. The word ‘genuine’ doesn’t mean that creationism or intelligent design deserve equal time. However, in certain classes, depending on the comfort of the teacher in dealing with such issues and the make up of the student body, it can be appropriate to deal with the issue. If questions or issues about creationism and intelligent design arise during science lessons they can be used to illustrate a number of aspects of how science works such as ‘how interpretation of data, using creative thought, provides evidence to test ideas and develop theories’; ‘that there are some questions that science cannot currently answer, and some that science cannot address’; ‘how uncertainties in scientific knowledge and scientific ideas change over time and about the role of the scientific community in validating these changes’.

Having said that, I don’t believe that such teaching is easy. Some students get very heated; others remain silent even if they disagree profoundly with what is said. The DCSF Guidance suggests: “Some students do hold creationist beliefs or believe in the arguments of the intelligent design movement and/or have parents/carers who accept such views. If either is brought up in a science lesson it should be handled in a way that is respectful of students’ views, religious and otherwise, whilst clearly giving the message that the theory of evolution and the notion of an old Earth / universe are supported by a mass of evidence and fully accepted by the scientific community”.

I too can pull interesting exceptions from both my own schooling and my own teaching.  My high school physics teacher was the very highly regarded Dick Sentman.  We sometimes watched Wile E. Coyote breaking the laws of physics. I think it helped me understand school science content about as well as anything I did in school.  He didn’t make claims, of course, that we could pause while falling.

Obviously, this is a different ball of wax — there aren’t many people out there who think that the physics of Warner Brothers is the physics of the real world.  There are a lot of people who believe that the creation story of the Bible is how the world was created. And we, as teachers, don’t want to make light of that.

It is different.

But we also know that the research on how people learn is clear.  If we want durable understanding to develop, we must engage existing conceptions related to the scientific conception.  The National Research Council’s Committee on How People Learn put it this way:

1. Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.

Pretty clear, if you ask me.  (There are links to research on how people learn on the Learning Links Page of the blog).

How can we forbid talking about these key conceptions about the origin of life on Earth and expect kids to understand evolution?

It’s essential to remember what we’ve been doing for a very long time has failed miserably.  Close to half of Americans think the world is several thousand years old (as opposed to about 4.5 billion years old).  The reject evolution.  That suggests to me the new to do things fundamentally differently.

Ironically, Reiss also notes:

One very rarely changes one’s worldview as a result of a 50 minute lesson, however well taught.

I guess the same can be said of the Royal Society’s worldview.

Download the paper here.

Let me step through a little math with you. $700 billion dollars divided by 300 million Americans is $2300/citizen. That’s over $9000 for my family of four — a very substantial portion of our annual household income.  There are only six billion people (only?) on Planet Earth.

The size of this proposed bailout is over $100 for each and every living human.

OVER ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR EVERY LIVING HUMAN.

I can’t help but think that we are so screwed.  Please, someone, PLEASE convince me that I’m wrong.  Please.

The world spent 1.2 trillion dollars on military expenditures in 2006.  The U.S. was 46% of that total.

So, that means this bailout will cost more than what the rest of the world spends on the military in a year.

A bailout appears to be necessary, but the rush of government to make its largest financial decision of my life in the course of a few days is truly terrifying.

And who’s running the show?  The people who led us into this mess.  Paulson and Bush have said repeatedly and recently that the economy is fundamentally sound.  And McCain said that this week.

I have to wonder if history will see the month of September 2008 as the beginning of the end of America’s dominance on the world financial stage.

Last night in thinking more about the end of school, it occurred to me that it’s in certain ways akin to current bursting of the real estate bubble and the earlier bursting of the dotcom bubble. Things generally don’t inflate forever.

Of course the U.S. military budget (and the overall U.S. budget and debt) are unlikely to expand forever. We know the same kinds of expansions came to a close for both Great Britain in the early 20th century and the Soviet Union at the end of that same century.

What are the things I’m talking about inflating related to the end of school?

Well, college tuition is one. These costs simply cannot rise forever. A second is the overall inflation of academic credentials. And grade inflation. At some point there will be corrections in all of these areas. A tuition correction will come when a better way to learn becomes obvious to the masses. (Or when we have complete economic collapse). I think the popping of the tuition bubble will be simultaneous with a burst in the inflating bubble of credential inflation. Of course, not all inflating things burst. Some may stabilize instead of explode. I think that’s more likely if people foresee the coming change.

Other examples? Some things inflate for an incredibly long time – like the human population. The population bubble will either burst catastrophically or gradually stabilize. That clearly depends on whether we’re smart as a population or not so smart (or if our leaders are smart and effective). Our track record isn’t so encouraging here, but last night I started reading Common Wealth, Jeffery Sachs’ new book. It appears to offer some hope for us.

One more: the healthcare bubble will either burst catastrophically or stabilize.

I think the analogy has legs. I invite you to either strengthen those legs or break them. Are there things that inflate forever? Are any of them human constructs? Are the things that seem to be forever inflating really endless or is it just that we can’t yet understand what will make them stabilize or pop?  Is the edusphere like the stock market — in the long term it grows and grows and grows, but are there periods where it shrinks in the shorter term?  I don’t know.

Again I ask, what do you think?

I see the institution of schooling (including academia) becoming vulnerable to collapse.  I came to Tapestry hoping, more or less, to be part of the overthrow of traditional schooling, and, curiously, I find myself using a more traditional approach than I have since I was newbie in the field.  What Tyack & Cuban call “the grammar of schooling” is very powerful indeed.

I came to Tapestry having given up on school reform. I came to Tapestry to engage in school replacement.  I saw (and still see) the rate of change within schools as, thanks to global warming, slower than glacial.  School reform can improve education, but I think the rate of change is doomed to be subglacial.

Allow me to expand on that a bit. When I was a beginning teacher back in the 1980s, school reform was often described as being like rebuilding a jumbo jet while in flight.  I was attracted to the metaphor. I thought, “Yes! It really is that hard!” I still like the metaphor, but for different reasons.  Now I think, “Yes, it really is that stupid!”  

They aren’t building the next generation of aircrafts by remodeling or rebuilding the current ones! They are making replacements, applying new engineering approaches, perhaps most importantly using much lighter weight materials for the aircraft bodies. Fortunately, they aren’t making these changes to airplanes that are in flight.  You really can’t substantially re-engineer either a school or a plane while it’s in use.

If you try, the thing will almost certainly crash.

That means make the change incredibly slowly. Or die. Or take the thing apart and rebuild it from scratch.

I think places like Tapestry might productively contribute to the partial collapse of traditional schooling, but I think homeschooling will play a stronger role in the end of schools’ hegemony in the edusphere.

Tapestry is an above average urban school, but it’s still essentially a school.  We put 25 or so kids in a room hour after hour after hour; day after day after day; year after year after year and expect kids to emerge substantially smarter at the end of that then they started.

That very commonplace idea certainly doesn’t seem like  a very good idea, but what should we do instead?  That’s a topic for another day.  Or for your comments.

I’ll close with a note to reiterate the point made in earlier posts and responses to comments on earlier posts — I know that it is possible for teachers to overcome the constraints of the system and change kids lives.   I personally know many such teachers.  A key point that I’m trying to make here is that I believe it is possible to create a new operating system for education that would make such an outcome much more likely.

Cheers,

Don

Note too the times for sunrise on the different dates. The first video shows the morning of November 11, 2007. The second shows the morning of January 3, 2008.

Pay attention to where the sun rises on the different days. (The time is hard to read underneath the youtube logo, dang it). You can run both videos at the same time and pause them at sunrise.  If you watch the video on the youtube site, there’s no logo.  The dates above are linked to Youtube and will open each in its own window.

The building in the distance is Erie County Medical Center. The clouds, especially in the second video are pretty cool to watch too.

Cheers,

Don