I felt she warranted some respectful mention here, though I’m unsure of what to say.  One thing is certainly to explore the natural world safely.

Here’s a link to story on the tragedy http://www.wkbw.com/news/local/27035774.html.

Some Technological Tips for Creating and Using Virtual Fieldwork

Making A VFE of the Niagara Whirlpool: Part 1

Making a VFE of the Niagara Whirlpool Part 2 — About Pictures & Panoramas

Making a VFE of the Niagara Whirlpool Part 3 — Putting Panoramas into Google Earth (You are here!)

What’s in this post?

• How to embed pictures and other media in Google Earth (GE)
• Making “zoomable” pictures using the ZoomImage Creator (and embedding those images)
• I created some icons for Google Earth and posted them to photobucket.com.
• The current version of the Google Earth VFE of the Niagara Whirlpool

When I want to place a picture in Google Earth, here’s what I do:

See the screencast of this process by clicking here.

• Post the picture to the web using a photo sharing website or, if I want to make a photo I can zoom in on, use the ZoomImage Creator.  More on the ZoomImage Creator below.  It’s cool!

Some of the big photo sharing sites (in alphabetical order):

• • flickr.com
  • photobucket.com
  • Panoramio.com
  • picasa.com
  • shutterfly.com
  • snapfish.com

• Create the placemark in Google Earth at the desired location.
• The placemark’s information window will open when you place the placemark.  If you close it, you can reopen the placemark window in GE by holding down the ‘command’ and the ‘i’ keys together.
• Copy the link from the picture’s website, preferably along with appropriate html code.
• Paste the html into the placemark window.  If you only have the URL without the code, look at another placemark formatted the way you want, open the placemark’s information window and copy it.  Replace the URL of the photo from the copied placemark text with the URL of the new photo.  The URL may be included twice.  If it is, replace both occurrences.  One may be a thumbnail image and the other a link to the full sized image on the web.
• Verify the location of the placemark.  You can drag it whenever the placemark window is open.

Some New Icons for Google Earth:

I wanted to be able to look at the lay of the land within Google Earth (GE) from the standard aerial view and be able to tell where one looks when bringing up embedded photos.  You can add custom icons to GE, and if you post them to a website, they’ll work for any user.

So, I made a bunch and posted them to Photobucket.  I’ve been exploring the various photosharing websites and chose Photobucket for this task as they make it really easy to link to your images and accept things in some formats that other sites don’t.

Picasa also facilitates copying html code fairly well.  You can see that in the video above.  Flickr allow you to write blog posts to your blog from a photo’s page — click on the “blog this” button.  That creates a blog post in your blog, which is kind of cool, but they don’t offer up the html code to cut and paste in a conspicuous way.

When you look at my icons album in Photobucket, you can see the html code in a couple of different formats that make for easy inclusion in either a website or GE.  Both Google Earth and websites rely on html for formatting.

Putting Icons on the Map

D’oh!  The description below has been simplified greatly by the combination of Google Earth and Picassa. Here’s my Picassa photos mapped.

1. Upload your pictures to Picassa.
2. Click on the individual photo you wish to map.
3. Click on ‘add location’ on the right side of the individual picture’s page.
4. Add the location.
5. Click on ‘View Album.’
6. Click on the ‘View Map’ button.  This brings up the map view (”No duh!” as some might say).
7. Click on ‘View in Google Earth.’

This should be a remarkable time saver for VFE creation.  The placemarks appear as tiny thumbnails of the photos.  The placemark pop up boxes are still editable — you can add text or links by clicking on the placemark and hitting the ‘control’ and ‘i’ keys.

Skip down to the next heading

Here’s the complicated procedure I used previously.  It might be useful for thinking about how to do certain things, but not embedding photos.

In Google Earth, it works largely the same way for putting in icons as it does for putting in pictures.  So, here’s the code for one icon using HTML:

<a href=”http://s517.photobucket.com/albums/u335/dugganhaas/Google%20Earth%20Panorama%20Icons/?action=view&current=PanoramaIconNW.gif” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i517.photobucket.com/albums/u335/dugganhaas/Google%20Earth%20Panorama%20Icons/PanoramaIconNW.gif” border=”0″ alt=”PanoramaIconNW”></a>

Most of the time when I’m writing my blog, I’m using the visual editor which makes writing the blog pretty much like writing in a word processor.  When I want do certain kinds of things, like put in a Youtube video or add an image from somewhere else on the web, I can edit in html, though I’m certainly a novice at that.  Sites that make the code obvious like Youtube, Photobucket and the National Academy Press make it a whole lot easier.   Since the html code is provided, all I need to do is:

• copy the code for embedding,
• switch back to the blog,
• switch from visual to html editing,
• paste the html code into the desired location (the text will still be readable to clue you into the right location),
• switch back to visible editing, and,
• there it is!

Or, here it is:

Unfortunately, I don’t know how to make the icons rotate with the map, so they only face the correct direction if north is at the top of the page.

Making Zoomable Images with ZoomImage:

Two cool websites I learned about today:

• The Gigapxl Project at http://gigapxl.org/. This has panoramas of a growing number of places (not yet including anything in the Niagara region of New York State) that are of a billion pixels.  High resolution digital cameras are now taking pictures with about 10 million pixels (that is, 10 megapixels).  These are whopping big images and the way they show up in Google Earth is way cool — turn on the Gigapixl Layer in Google Earth and then fly into those pictures.  This really does allow you to take a closer look at whatever they happen to take pictures of, but that’s a pretty small set right now.  A couple of pictures that might somehow connect to VFEs are of Angel’s Window in the Grand Canyon and Newspaper Rock in Utah.  There are quite a few more of interest, too.  It’s cool to look at on these websites, but it’s cooler to fly around through them in Google Earth.
• The ZoomImage Creator at http://vigh.org/zoomimage/.  This site allows you to upload a high resolution photo and convert it into a Quicktime VR image which allows you to zoom within the picture.  The picture is posted to the web and available for download.   It’s worth noting that this didn’t work in Firefox on my Mac but it did work in Safari.  I’ll add a note if I figure out the problem.

Images from the Gigapixl are already in Google Earth, so you’ve already got them.  If you’re making a VFE of one of the locations where Gigapixl pictures are available, you’ve got a nifty resource.

It’s a little more complicated for getting the ZoomImage pictures into Google Earth, but it’s doable.  It is a movie, so this means you can put movies of other things into your VFEs as well, using the same formatting.  Posting Youtube videos is doable as well, but requires some different coding.

I found the code for embedding Quicktime Movies on a presentation sharing site called Slideshare.net.  Here’s the link to the presentation with the code.  The presentation is from Mike Bryant at Discovery Education.  In the same presentation are code snippets for other kinds of media.  Note that scrolling down gives you the presentation text in a format where you can cut and paste.  But, I can easily embed it right here:

Here is the text and the code for a Quicktime Movie in the Google Earth VFE of the Niagara Gorge.  It should work for web pages too.

This outcrop is near the top of the Whirlpool Rapids Trail.  Note that the image is zoomable.
<br>
<br>

<object width=”189″ height=”360″ classid=”clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B” codebase=”http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab”>  <param name=”src” value=”sample.mov”>  <param name=”autoplay” value=”true”>  <param name=”controller” value=”false”>  <embed src=”http://vigh.org/zoomimage/sessions/mov/546024494/UpperTrailWall1.mov” width=”189″ height=”380″ autoplay=”true” controller=”true” pluginspage=”http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/”>  </embed>  </object>
<br>
<br>

The image can be downloaded here:
http://vigh.org/zoomimage/sessions/mov/546024494/UpperTrailWall1.mov
Click on the arrow icons to open thumbnails of photographs taken from the marked location.  Clicking on the thumbnail will take you to a higher resolution copy of the photograph in your browser.

And, when I switch to the HTML editor and paste in just the code (the stuff between the <br> <br>s), it looks like this on the blog:

Use the shift key to zoom and the mouse to pan.

Here’s
Download.

Cool, huh?  And, again, you can create your own with The ZoomImage Creator at http://vigh.org/zoomimage/. After you make them you can link to the image on the web and/or download it. 

Here’s the current draft of the Google Earth piece of the VFE.  A website is under development, too.  More will be added to the Google Earth piece as well.  I’ll like head back to the gorge next week.  If you’re in the area and want to come along, let me know.

Click on the image below to download the file.

The Niagara Whirlpool VFE in Google Earth (First Draft)

Note that servers need to allow kmz (Google Earth) files to work properly.  Edublogs apparently allows Google Earth files.  Colgate did not.

In this post, pondering balance leads into a discussion of what should be at the center of teaching and then back to balance in the form of considering one’s niche.

Thoughts on Balancing Dynamic Entities

I’ve spent a lot of time so far this month immersed in technology and a bit of time immersed in nature (and thinking a lot about geology in the process).  That’s all for the purpose of pedagogy – trying to help teachers and their students understand the Earth system.  I think in the modern Earth science classroom, technology, pedagogy and geology are inseparable.

In fact, this trio has always been inseparable in the classroom, but the technologies used today are far different than they were as recently as ten years ago.  Does that change the balance?   I don’t know.  Maybe in a dynamic equilibrium sort of way?  That is, the scales may be balanced, but the stuff in the balance pans is ever changing.

To teach science well, the triad of content, pedagogy and technology have always been essential, though you might argue that it has been a technology infused duo of content and pedagogy. Be it blackboard, stream table or Google Earth, technology has always been a piece of the pedagogical puzzle.

Some of the struggle here is that not only are we teaching about the complex system that is the Earth system, but we are also teaching within the complex system that is the system of education.  Both systems are composed of a great many (effectively infinite) actors acting across many interrelated levels that dynamically interact.  No easy task.

Both systems are technology rich, too.  And in both systems, we often use technology to maximize.

In the system of schooling, we are often pushed to maximize many, many things:

• Test scores,
• Graduation rates,
• Critical thinking skills,
• Literacy of many sorts,
• Politeness,
• Environmental stewardship,
• Return on investment, and,
• Much, much more.

We’re also expected to minimize certain things – budgets and misbehavior are perhaps the top two on that list.

Optimize, don’t maximize.

Maximizing and minimizing are mismatched with balancing.  You cannot, for example, simultaneously maximize learning and minimize cost.  Stretching toward one extreme may mean losing sight of the other.  Good teachers and administrators, of course, already know that and whether they recognize it or not they seek to optimize.

Is technology a tool for optimization?

We should be using technology to support both our pedagogy and our geology.  Some might think that means technology is a tool for that end.  Well, sort of.

We certainly use technological tools (be they rock hammers, pieces of chalk or computer software packages), but technology writ large should only be thought of a tool in the way that we think of language as a tool.  Sure, they’re both tools, but they are oh so much more.

Our work as educators should be to build understanding.

One might argue that optimization is maximization within constraints.  What is it that we want to come out of the practice of schooling?  Well, apparently all that stuff in the bulleted list above, but for me it’s understanding or a specific sort.  Understanding that informs action.

Is that kind of understanding more likely to result from student-centered teaching or teacher-centered teaching?  Here I’m unsure of the answer to my own question because I think it’s the wrong question to ask.   We’re off the mark if we think of ourselves as either content-centered or student-centered.

Teaching should be understanding-driven, or understanding-centered. That’s an idea I picked up from Andy Anderson, while in grad school, now long ago.  All kinds of folks still talk about this false dichotomy between teacher-centered and student-centered teaching.  Understanding-centered teaching isn’t some happy midpoint between teacher- (or content-) centered teaching and student-centered teaching.  It’s something else entirely.

That doesn’t mean that student-centered and content-centered teachers aren’t out there.  When you ask a student-centered teacher what she teaches, she may well answer, “I teach kids.”  Indeed.  And sages on stages who are genuine fonts of knowledge about their content areas are out there too.  There are good teachers in both categories, and maybe some on a line in between those two things we think of as extremes.  But no one would claim that teaching is one dimensional.

We may be able to characterize aspects of teaching on lines, on scales from one to ten (or whatever), but there are so many aspects to effective teaching that we end up not a set of scales or even a matrix, but rather, a multidimensional hypervolume (Hutchinson, 1957).  Zoiks!  How can you balance that?

A multidimensional hypervolume is how Hutchinson classified an ecological niche.  Pedagogy, geology and technology are perhaps three important “niche axes.”  Hutchinson also noted that niches are not simply the jobs of organisms, but also what limits them.  (This definition of niche is richer and more on target than what I remember from high school biology).

Our technologies are not infinitely extendible.  We don’t have an unlimited supply of either cash or time (are those two more niche axes?) to create anything our minds can conceive.  My currently accessible technology exceeds that of some teachers and falls short of many too.  In the work of VFEs, we need to better understand the technological range in classrooms and the range of technological skills.  I need to gain a better understanding of these niche axes.  Again, no easy task.

The project, I think, has the potential to extend the technological niche axes of individual teacher and offer something to the population of teachers (at least that 99+% with Internet access).  In so doing, we can hopefully also extend the geologic axes and the pedagogical axes as well.  And somehow show the National Science Foundation we’ve done so.

I may have wandered away from the questions that started this post, questions may I didn’t state directly enough:

• How can we help teachers maintain or achieve the “right” balance of pedagogy, geology and technology?
• How much time can we expect teachers to be able to devote to the creation and use of VFEs?
• What’s more important — getting a great finished product or getting finished?
• What’s more important — getting teachers into the field and studying the Earth system or getting polished VFEs?
• What can we do to optimize understanding in the creation and use of VFEs?
• Will technologically streamlining the process for VFE creation make that process and its outcomes more didactic?

Those questions arose because I know that most teachers won’t be able to put in the time in a single year that I’ve put in on my still unfinished VFE.  All of these questions have to do with issues of balance.

What do you think?

Some Technological Tips for Creating and Using Virtual Fieldwork

Making A VFE of the Niagara Whirlpool: Part 1

Making a VFE of the Niagara Whirlpool Part 2 — About Pictures & Panoramas (You are here!)

Making a VFE of the Niagara Whirlpool Part 3 — Putting Panoramas into Google Earth

I spent Thursday afternoon and most of Friday above and in the Niagara Gorge, mostly near the Whirlpool and Whirlpool Rapids.  Nice work if you can get it.

I took scads of photographs — about 300.  Now, I need to be attentive to the old joke:

Q: What’s the difference between an amateur and a professional photographer?

A: The professional throws the bad pictures away.

I’ve been putting the pictures together and sorting them out. About a third of them are now posted on my Picasa page.  Without an organized approach, that’s probably still too many.  The Virtual Fieldwork Experience (VFE) that will be built around these images will attempt to organize the pictures in a way that maps onto (literally) the way the gorge is actually laid out.

The VFE will be posted on virtualfieldwork.org and the creation process will be detailed here.

In this post, I’ll talk a bit about the thinking behind some specific photographs and this amateur’s photographic techniques.

One of the reasons I have so many pictures is that I’ve found myself addicted to Adobe Photoshop’s ‘Photomerge‘ feature.  Photomerge is what allows you to very simply make panoramas.  In fact, I’ve ended up with enough panoramas that I need to consider the joke above related to them as well.

Why do I like panoramas?

For the purpose of Virtual Fieldwork Experiences, I like that panoramas allow you to get the big picture.  With a typical camera at an interesting site, you can’t begin to capture in a picture what the eye can take in.  VFEs will never beat being there, but they do allow for a broader perspective.  Or a taller one.

Panoramas allow the VFE user to take a closer look at what interests the VFE user.  If the resolution is high, the user can go from looking at rock strata across the gorge to looking at the grains of the rock at her virtual feet.

The ability to stitch pictures together allows one to upgrade one’s camera without getting a new camera.  You’re not limited to panoramas either.  You can make a quilt of pictures into a single very high resolution photograph.  You can also scan things bigger than your scanner and stitch them together.

Panoramas also allow the camera to focus on things at different distances — in a panorama that sweeps up from the photographer’s feet, the near and the far are both in focus.  That’s cool.  Another cool way to do that is HDR.  That’s on my eventual to-learn list.

Like a camera, your eye can’t focus on the near and far simultaneously, but the eye makes nearly instantaneous adjustments in focus.  That makes it so these photographic tricks aren’t cheating — they’re methods that allow photographers to capture images more like what the eye actually sees.

How to make a panorama in Photoshop:

I made a short how to video using Jing and tried to embed the Jing thing here, but the embedding yielded some very goofy formatting.  Follow this link to see the video in a different window. (Even if Jing is a little clunky in embedding, it’s still very cool).

You may have noticed in the video that there are pictures of my hand before and after the pictures used to make the panorama.  That is there to let me know where the series starts and stops.

A sneak preview of non-photographic content (click on it):

Some Technological Tips for Creating and Using Virtual Fieldwork

Making A VFE of the Niagara Whirlpool: Part 1(You are here!)

Making a VFE of the Niagara Whirlpool Part 2 — About Pictures & Panoramas

Making a VFE of the Niagara Whirlpool Part 3 — Putting Panoramas into Google Earth

Balancing Pedagogy, Technology and Geology (or whatever content you teach): Putting Understanding at the Center of Teaching

Creating a New Virtual Fieldwork Experience

I’m going to start fresh on a VFE of the Niagara Whirlpool in the Niagara River Gorge, just north (downstream) of the Falls.  This post is the first of a planned series on pulling that together.

My goals for this include:

• Creating a resource for teachers and students.
• Pushing myself to think and learn about the geology of my new/old home region.  (I’ve recently returned to Western New York, where I grew up but haven’t lived in 25 years).
• Design teacher professional development workshops in which teachers are immersed in VFE design and creation.  The idea I want to flesh out is having teachers work in teams to rapidly learn how to create VFEs and, simultaneously, work together to create a detailed, large scale VFE.  The current thought is that teacher teams would each focus on a particular feature of process and assemble a mini-VFE or VFE component focused on that one aspect.  These would then be tied together using Google Earth.
• I wish to emulate what we’ll have to do in some of these workshops — a first look without a whole lot of region specific background knowledge and then limited time to figure out what different teams might do.

I’ll collect a few resources, both in the form of electronic documents and materials and head out shortly.  What do I need?  Maps of the area, for sure.  Google Maps can produce a topographic map of the region(click on ‘Terrain’), but it’s probably good to also have the USGS quadrangle map of the area as well as what I produce in Google Earth.  That first USGS link takes you to the homepage for USGS Topographic maps.  From there, you can either purchase maps or download them.

Here’s a snippet of the USGS Topographic Map:

Here’s a snippet of the map in Google Maps:

This link will take you directly to the place for downloading USGS Topographic Maps.  I’ll be taking my computer (carefully) with me into the gorge, so I’ve downloaded the Whirlpool map.  That’s excerpted above.  The Whirlpool is pretty close to the north edge of the map, so I’ve also downloaded the next map to the north.  A smaller scale map covering a corner of New York State and much of Ontario is also available for download, but at first glance, I don’t think I’ll need it.

Foreshadowing a future post: it’s fairly straightforward to choose a section of a topographic or geologic map and overlay it in Google Earth.

It’s also useful to have a geologic map.  Depending on my time frame, I may stop at the Schoellkopf Geological Museum in Niagara Falls to see if I can buy one (and to check out what all is there).  Here’s a simplified map from Cochise College’s Virtual Geology Museum:

You can find a much more detailed geologic map (and maps of the entire state) here:

http://geology.about.com/library/bl/maps/blnewyorkmap.htm

Be sure to download the legend as it’s a separate file from the maps.

That’s some useful to direct you.  Of course, there’s more that’s possible to do, like reading Colossal Cataracts, by Irving H. Tesmer, Jerold C. Bastedo, for example.  But you can also do productive things doing less.  I think it’s most important to get out there and look, and to get your students out there looking.

VFEs will never take the place of actually getting out there and looking at the world.  They can, we hope, help you to look more thoughtfully, and help you and your students get ready to go out there, but get out there - ready or not!

Here’s some things you might bring:

• Map or maps
• Camera
• Scale, ruler or meter stick to include in photographs
• Compass
• First aid kit
• GPS unit
• Comfortable shoes

If you’re going to an area where you can collect samples:

•    Rock hammer (chisel-head preferred)
•    Goggles or other eyewear protection
•    Resealable bags or small specimen boxes, with tissue for wrapping smaller specimens (clear bags with white areas are preferred for writing to label and record specimen data).  Freezer bags are more durable than sandwich bags.
•    Small boxes or plastic totes for carrying bagged specimens
•    Permanent marker for labeling bags and/or boxes and rocks if possible.
•    Specimen labels

It’s not legal to collect in most parks, including all New York State parks, so I won’t need anything from the second list.

That’s it.  I’m out of here for my first of at least a few trips to get this thing together!

Cheers,

Don

First, the how to:

On the VFE Workshops Page, I’ve added materials related to our most recent workshop.  That includes:

• the session PowerPoint , with the beginning of a Taughannock Falls State Park VFE and;
• a short video on how to embed pictures in pictures.

Some other resources for Taughannock Falls:

• If you’re after just some of the pictures of Taughannock, more than 40 are on a page I created on Flickr.com and,
• here’s the central part of the PowerPoint in pdf format.  Note that the links embedded in the pictures are preserved in the pdf.

And, just a couple of nice pictures of the falls:

It was pretty dry in August of 2005 when this picture was taken.  The people by the water’s edge give you a good idea of scale.  The falls is 215 feet high.  If you go today, you’ll note that the toungue of just below and to the right of the crest of the falls is missing its left half.

Here’s a picture taken from below the falls from just over a year later.  Do you see the difference?

There are more pictures on the Flickr.com page.

I wanted to share the simple and nifty way I made the “how to video.”

The Jing Project has free software for capturing video of your computer screen and, at least for the time being, allows you to share those “screencasts” for free.  The video tour on the homepage gives a good overview of its basic use and has the download link.

I was initially puzzled by where the icon went when I started the software.  It practically goes out of sight into the corner.  I could make an introductory video on how to use just about any bit of software with Jing - except for Jing itself as it intentionally goes into the background when in use.  And, besides, Jing has a page of “How do I…” videos.

Now, just a few thoughts on the What Fors:

Why embed pictures in pictures?

This is one small way we can simulate the field experience.  We want students to do things geologists do when in the field even when we can’t get students actually into the field.  One key thing is simply that, when in the field, you can take a closer look at the things of your own choosing.  Sarah Miller’s Virtual Fieldwork Experience of the area around Norwich, New York is a good example.

The examples for Tuaghannock provided here really only give the opportunity to look more closely at things I, as the teacher, chose.   Hopefully though, you can see how to build on that as you gradually develop your own VFEs.

What can you do with how to videos?

If you do a computer activity in class, you can create a set of the key technological steps.  That could let you focus on teaching your content rather than how to be a technician with the particular software.  If your kids are using PowerPoint, for example, your primary goal as a science teacher is the science they present, not the stylishness of their slide transitions.

Using Jing when you don’t have the Internet in your classroom…

This past year, I taught in a classroom without Internet access.  I used Jing to show certain animations from websites that didn’t save to my computer’s cache.  I could, for example, play sequences of weather maps from here: http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/html/sfcloop/namne_wbg.html

Closing thoughts and questions…

It turns out making the video was about the simplest piece of this post.  I don’t think I’d have guessed that were I the reader.  Wow.  It seems as though something’s changed in the way I can post pictures on the blog to make it more complicated, and embedding videos too.

What uses do you see for these technologies?  What other techniques and technologies will or have you employed in VFEs (or teaching other stuff)?

I hope to be blogging more soon.

Don

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

This is the visualization of an idea that I created while doing my dissertation research many years ago.

It’s been on my mind a lot lately. It’s easy to blame other parts of the system for the frustrations you (or I) feel. Of course, placing blame is only of limited utility. If you don’t use the determination of causality (a.k.a., figuring out who or what is to blame) of a problem to help solve that problem, there’s no real point to it. Except maybe to make you feel better. And that’s not unimportant, but…

But, it doesn’t really improve much other than your own state of mind.

If, however, it leads to helping to solve the problem, assigning blame is worthwhile.

It seems to me that the desire is often to blame individuals or classes of individuals (as in the diagram above). I think this misses the mark much of the time. Even blaming problematic institutions misses the mark. Schools didn’t create the problems of society (or at least not most of them). Is it appropriate for schools to fix them?

You might argue that that is what schools are for.  You might be right.

However, schools, as they stand today, aren’t up to the task. As I’ve noted before, most Americans don’t understand basic science, basic mathematics, basic history, and on and on, even though they’ve been taught that stuff over and over again.

Schools seem intent on teaching that stuff, but I think in a decade or two we’ll look back and see that that was the wrong prescription for the ailments of our society.  I suppose that statement is me placing blame on schools for not fixing our problems.

Much to ponder, and I’ve been pondering much in my hiatus from blogging. Hopefully I’ll get more of that out there in the next little while.

Cheers,

Don