I’ve watched American Idol since its inception and am a fan. Months ago, I predicted that Angie would win this year. we will know for sure in a few weeks.

In the post-Simon Cowell years of American Idol, the quality of judging has become tedious, cloying and adoring of the young contestants. There has been little instructive teaching for the kids competing or the audience at home. That’s a shame because American Idol used to feature legendary artists every week as mentors who would perform a quickie masterclass for contestants (and audience) who otherwise would enjoy no such access to expertise. One of my favorite mentors a few years back was Harry Connick, Jr. It was also one of the lowest rated episodes of the season. Despite the relative (un)popularity of Mr. Connick, he taught the kids, played with them and wrote charts suited to their talents. He was a great mentor.

I was thrilled to see Harry back on Idol again this week and he ignited a firestorm when he refused to agree with the incredibly terrible advice being dispensed by an incredibly disingenuous Randy Jackson. You can the details of his awful advice in the well-written article linked below, but suffice to say that Mr. Jackson knows better. He may not have the talent and musical knowledge of Harry Connick, Jr., but he has enjoyed a great deal of success in the music business. If Randy Jackson had been paying for Kree’s studio time as a producer, his advice would have been exactly the same as that of Mr. Connick.

After Wednesday night’s show, an educator colleague of mine posted the following message on Facebook:

1. As Randy Jackson reminds us constantly, “this is a singing competition!” Singers should be able to sing anything.
2. The #1 album today is by Michael Bublé, a guy who sings the Great American Songbook. These classic songs are contemporary hits.

“The point Connick tried to make, which Jackson didn’t want to hear, was that the show’s contestants didn’t know these classic songs well enough to take liberties with their melodies and lyrics. In doing so, they were murdering the music.” – John Stark

To paraphrase the great Aughts philosopher, Ms. Britney Spears, “Oops, I’m doing it again.”

Yes siree folks, on Saturday April 27th,  I will be premiering my new one-man show, “Less Us, More Them,” as a newly ordained hipster at TEDxNYED in Brooklyn, NY. (I hear they grow trees there now)

Why am I a hypocrite? Need you ask?

I dislike TED. It’s the playground of overprivileged rich kids sharing a distasteful libertarian philosophy that would make Ayn Rand say, “Wow, you boys are immature.” TED celebrates and accentuates the short attention span of our culture. It confers expertise and celebrity on anyone who can rhyme, speak quickly or has a YouTube video.

Thanks to TED, we can now watch three self-important and self-proclaimed experts in the span of one Kardashians episode!

Disclaimer: Before I say anymore mean things about TED, I must state that the fine women and men who organize TEDxNYED are terrific human beings and educators who stage a world-class event with terrific speakers.

When TED began, it was a small gathering of smart and talented folks. Each attendee was also a presenter. For the swells who can afford to be invited to TED, they undoubtedly enjoy a rich social learning experience. For the rest of us peasants, we’re the reason TED can sell Rolex and BMW commercials. TED is a television show. We get to peep in on the action from our PCs like we’re hiding in the basement  watching naughty videos.

In addition to my sense that too many people believe that TED is the only place to find smart people or ideas, the format of TED Talks disturbs me.

Our society needs more dialogue and a whole lot fewer monologues. The US Senate has become a TED Talk where nothing is accomplished. We cannot solve tough problems by giving speeches. We need collective action, not soaring rhetoric. I would love nothing more than to discuss teaching computer programming with fellow TEDxNYED speaker Douglas Rushkoff or matters of school reform with the other terrific speakers.  Imagine what one might learn from a discussion between the sorts of people who perform TED talks!

Schools that make kids perform TED Talks do so because the format is consistent with a tradition of oral book reports or making PowerPoint presentations on a topic you don’t care about to a bored audience.

There are indeed some excellent TED Talks made by remarkable humans. In fact,  I wrote a blog post recommending several TED Talks to share with kids.

For those of you who can’t attend TEDxNYED in-person, I’m sure that the event will be leaked/streamed/piddled/wee-weed or whatever those crazy kids are doing today on the Internets. Check the http://tedxnyed.com/2013/ for more info!

In the meantime, I humbly offer my last TED Talk.

CMK Founder Gary Stager, Ph.D. gave a presentation in November 2012 about the philosophy and practice of Constructing Modern Knowledge. The following video is a recording of that presentation about the institute.

Click here to register for Constructing Modern Knowledge 2013 today!

 

Constructing Modern Knowledge may be the most important work of my career. For five years, we have demonstrated the competence and creativity of educators who spend four days of their summer vacation learning to learn in the digital age. I marvel at the complexity, sophistication and ingenuity illustrated by the educator’s projects created at Constructing Modern Knowledge. It is not an exaggeration to say that several of the projects created at CMK 2012 would have earned the creator(s) a TED Talk two years ago and an MIT Ph.D. five years ago.

CMK remains committed to creating a space where educators remake themselves by engaging in personally meaningful projects and learn through firsthand experience. It is NOT a conference. It is a samba school, laboratory, playground, library, maker space, film studio, atelier or workshop filled with people and objects to think with.

Constructing Modern Knowledge is a reflection of each participant. Some alums will say that CMK is about being at the forefront of the Maker movement, or about the Reggio Emilia approach, or about creativity, or robotics or filmmaking, or history, or school reform, or about S.T.E.M., or music composition or collaboration or visiting the MIT Media Lab. CMK is all of those things and what each participant makes of the experience.

Our remarkable faculty supports the learning of each participant and our guest speakers share a daily dose of inspiration. Given the diversity of the participants and the enormous range of projects created, CMK means different things to different people. So, what is CMK about?

Constructing Modern Knowledge is about:

• Jamming on a cupcake
• Looking up
• Looking in
• Cool tools
• Floating above the classroom
• Bringing Edison back to life
• Reinventing yourself
• Painting a piano
• Programming random Shakespearean insults
• Giving Lego a ukulele lesson
• Teaching a robot to use Twitter
• Becoming the next great YouTube filmmaker
• Getting lost in the flow
• Learning to solder
• Scoring a cartoon
• Snapping lots of photos
• Creating an animation
• Having lunch with your hero
• Sneaking around the MIT media lab
• Feeling smart
• Time lapse photography
• Laughing really hard
• Charging your iPhone by peddling a bike
• Tinkering
• Being a historian
• Working alone
• Working in teams
• Cool tools
• Aluminum foil
• Understanding astrophysics through dance
• Being silly
• Being serious
• A digital butler keeping your beer cold
• Engineering
• Secret ice cream
• Measuring your whiffle bat swing
• Manch Vegas
• Brightening a Rwandan child’s day
• Flow
• Fixing the future with air-curing rubber
• Makey Makey
• Conquering the geometry of islamic tiles
• Conductive paint
• Mathematical thinking
• Designing a video game
• Making friends
• Expanding your personal learning network
• Feeling smart
• Feeling foolish
• Confusion
• Finding science in your art and electronics in your peanut butter
• Satisfaction
• Scratch
• Learning to learn
• Bursting balloons
• The Reggio Emilia Approach
• Clarity
• Turning trash into treasure
• Reading
• MicroWorlds
• Constructionism
• Computer graphics
• Storytelling
• The 100 languages of children
• Chatting with Marvin Minsky
• Ingenuity
• Choreographed t-shirts
• Turtle Art
• Coffee with a legend
• Writing
• Progressive education
• Creativity unleashed
• Computing
• An amazing faculty
• Powerful ideas
• Changing the world
• A smile-controlled robot
• Exploring linguistic patterns of the 1940s
• Challenging yourself
• Sounding like Eleanor Roosevelt
• Brazilian churascaria
• Wearable computing
• Whimsy
• Never finding the pool
• Raising standards
• Blowing your mind
• MIDI
• Conversation
• Re-imagining education
• Expanding your comfort zone
• Being super awesome
• Taking off your teacher hat
• Putting on your learner hat
• Action!

Join the learning adventure with us July 9-12, 2013 in Manchester, NH!

Register today!

Download a printable brochure for Constructing Modern Knowledge 2013

 

 

Larry Ferlazzo invited me to share a vision of computers in education for inclusion in his Classroom Q&A Feature in Education Week. The text of that article is below.

You may also enjoy two articles I published in 2008:

1. What’s a Computer For? Part 1 – It all depends on your educational philosophy
2. What’s a Computer For? Part 2 – Computer science is the new basic skill

Technology is Not Neutral
Educational computing requires a clear and consistent stance
Gary S. Stager, Ph.D.
constructingmodernknowledge.com

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.”

Some people view the computer as a way of increasing efficiency. Heck, there are schools with fancy-sounding names popping-up where you put 200 kids in a room with computer terminals and an armed security guard. The computer quizzes kids endlessly on prior knowledge and generates a tsunami of data for the system. This may be cheap and efficient, but it does little to empower the learner or take advantage of the computer’s potential as the protean device for knowledge construction.

School concoctions like information literacy, digital citizenship or making PowerPoint presentations represent at best a form of “Computer Appreciation.” The Conservative UK Government just abandoned their national ICT curriculum on the basis of it being “harmful and dull” and is calling for computer science to be taught K-12. I could not agree more.

My work with children, teachers and computers over the past thirty years has been focused on increasing opportunity and replacing “quick and easy” with deep and meaningful experiences. When I began working with schools where every student had a laptop in 1990, project-based learning was supercharged and Dewey’s theories were realized in ways he had only imagined. The computer was a radical instrument for school reform, not a way of enforcing the top-down status quo.

Now, 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. 5^th 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 10^th 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.

Three recommendations:

1) Kids need real computers capable of programming, video editing, music composition and controlling external peripherals, such as probes or robotics. Since the lifespan of school computers is long, they need to do all of the things adults expect today and support ingenuity for years to come.

2) Look for ways to use computers to provide experiences not addressed by the curriculum. Writing, communicating and looking stuff up are obvious uses that require little instruction and few resources.

3) Every student deserves computer science experiences during their K-12 education. Educators would be wise to consider programming environments designed to support learning and progressive education such as MicroWorlds EX and Scratch.

‎”The school must open its doors. It must reach out and spread itself, and come into direct contact with all its people. Each day the power of the school must be felt in some corner of the school district. It must work so that everybody sees its work and daily appraises that work…

We must change the notion that the school is a cloistered institution, by breaking down its walls and having it come into direct contact with people… It must use the factory, the stores, the neighboring parks, the museums, not incidentally, but fully and with deliberation…

We must change our attitude toward the child… I feel that the attitude toward the school and the child is the ultimate attitude by which America is to be judged. Indeed, the distinctive contribution America is to make to the world’s progress is not political, economical, religious, but educational – the child (is) our national strength, the school as the medium through which the adult is to be remade.”

Angelo Patri – 1917
A Schoolmaster of the Great City: A Progressive Educator’s Pioneering Vision for Urban Schools

He was right then. He is right today! Read and learn!

Every problem in public education (and society in general) is identified and solved by Patri in this book published nearly a century ago.

I often explain to graduate students that I don’t play devil’s advocate or any other clever games. Just because I may say something unsaid by others, does not mean that I don’t come to that perspective after careful thought and introspection.

Being an educator is a sacred obligation. Those of us who know better, need to do better and stand between the defenseless children we serve and the madness around us. If a destructive idea needs to be challenged or a right defended, I’ll speak up.

My career allows me to spend time in lots of classrooms around the world and to work with thousands of educators each year. This gives me perspective. I am able to identify patterns, good and bad, often before colleagues become aware of the phenomena. I have been blessed with a some communication skills and avenues for expression. I’ve published hundreds of articles and spoken at even more conferences.

People seem interested in what I have to say and for that I am extremely grateful.

The problem is that I am increasingly called upon to argue against a popular trend. That tends to make me unpopular. In the field of education, where teachers are “nice,” criticism is barely tolerated. Dissent is seen as defect and despite all of my positive contributions to the field, I run the risk of being dismissed as “that negative guy.”

Recently, I have written or been quoted on the following topics:

• Against Khan Academy in Wired magazine
• Against BYOD in Learning and Leading with Technology
• Against interactive whiteboards in Technology and Learning magazine
• Against tablet computers in education (in-press) for Scholastic Administrator magazine
• Against video games in education in Parade magazine
• Against Bill Gates’ influence on school policy in GOOD and The Huffington Post
• Against Daniel Pink’s dubious learning theories on my personal blog
• Against Education Nation in The Huffington Post

I’ve also written against homework, NCLB, RTTT, Michelle Rhee, Eli Broad, Joel Klein, standardized testing, Education Nation, Common Core Curriculum Standards, Accelerated Reader, merit pay, Arne Duncan, union-busting, Cory Booker, Teach for America, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, mayoral control, the ISTE NETs, Hooked-on-Phonics, President Obama’s education policies, etc… You get the idea.

These are perilous times for educators. When once bad education policy was an amuse-bouche you could easily ignore, it has become a Carnegie Deli-sized shit sandwich. Educators are literally left to pick their own poison, when choice is permitted at all. If I take a stand against a fad or misguided education policy, my intent is to inform and inspire others to think differently or take action.

So why, pray tell am I boring my dear readers with my personal angst? An old friend and colleague just invited me to write a magazine article about the “Flipped Classroom.” Sure, I think the flipped classroom is a preposterous unsustainable trend, masquerading as education reform, in which kids are forced to work a second unpaid shift because adults refuse to edit a morbidly obese curriculum. But….

The question is, “Do I wish to gore yet another sacred cow?” Is speaking truth to power worth the collateral damage done to my career?

In the 1960s, the great Neil Postman urged educators to hone highly-tuned BS and crap detectors. Those detectors need to be set on overdrive today. I’m concerned that I’m the only one being burned.

What to do? What to do?

I don’t know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I’m against it!
No matter what it is
Or who commenced it
I’m against it!

Your proposition may be good
But let’s have one thing understood
Whatever it is, I’m against it!
And even when you’ve changed it
Or condensed it
I’m against it!

Whatever It Is, I'm Against It
by Harry Ruby & Bert Kalmar From the Marx Bros. film "Horse Feathers" (1932) 

 

The following is the program description and proposal for my upcoming “conversation” at Educon 2.5 in Philadelphia, January 26th.

You Say You Want Tech Standards?
Here Come the NITS!

Gary S. Stager, Ph.D.
Brian C. Smith
Martin Levins

Program description

The ISTE Nets (tech standards) are approximately a decade old. They’ve produced endless meetings, cliché-laden documents and breathless rhetoric, but no perceptible increase in student computer fluency or teacher competence. Rather than standardizing, it’s time to amplify human potential with computers. A new diet of computing is required for learners.

Abstract

There are a lot of computers in schools, but not a lot of computing. The ISTE Nets and their state and local spawn offer an imagination-free vision of school technology use that hardly justifies the investment let alone realizes the potential of computers as intellectual laboratories or vehicles for self-expression. The current crop of technology standards form the basis, at best, for a form of “computer appreciation” being taught in school.

If school leaders demand them, we should offer tech standards worthy of our students based on powerful ideas and a commitment to teacher renewal. We must move beyond the trivial and use computers in a fashion consistent with modern knowledge construction. These new “standards” elevate school computing and challenge traditional notions of top-down schooling.

Let’s call them N.I.T.S. – New Intergalactic Technology Standards.

Gary and his virtual friends, Brian Smith in Hong Kong and Martin Levins in Australia, will share their recommendations for raising our standards to the level kids deserve. Educon participants can argue the merits of these goals and add their own. You should have a lot fewer meetings to attend when your superiors are afraid of our new standards.

Everybody wins! Standards, up yours!

---

Feel free to add your standards suggestions as comments below…

Dear colleagues and friends of progressive education,

It is time for us to stop arguing against high-stakes testing. Americans LOVE the idea of high-stakes as long as it means that their kid beats someone else’s kids at school.

We are losing both the battle and the war of ideas.

I humbly suggest that we replace high-stakes testing with the term, constant testing.

Parents, policy-makers and taxpayers are likely unaware that kids in some jurisdictions spend dozens of days each school year taking standardized tests. That doesn’t include the costs or time wasted on endless test-prep. This practice is obviously unsustainable, excessive and nonsensical.

This subtle rhetorical shift to constant testing has the potential to move public opinion in our direction.

Come see Gary Stager speak at the forthcoming events!

November 5, 2012
Keynote speaker
16th Annual Innovative Learning Institute
Norman, Oklahoma

November 6, 2012
Workshop Leader – Digital Reggio
NAEYC Annual Conference
Atlanta, Georgia

November 7, 2012
Featured speaker
ISACS Annual Conference
Louisville, Kentucky

November 14, 2012
Keynote speaker
Three Rivers Educational Technology Conference
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

November 28, 2012
Multiple presenter
Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference
Manchester, New Hampshire

November 29, 2012
Keynote speaker
Illinois Educational Technology Conference
Springfield, Illinois

December 6, 2012
Keynote speaker
RCAC 2012 Conference
London, Ontario

January 9, 2013
Keynote speaker
New keynote = The Creative Technology Revolution You Can’t Afford to Miss
Technology Leadership Institute
Briarcliff Manor, NY

January 27-28, 2013
Presenter
Educon 2.5
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Australia/New Zealand
Late May – Early June 2013

Constructing Modern Knowledge
July 9-12, 2013

If you wish to have Gary Stager lead PD at your school or speak at your event, contact him here

A list of workshop and keynote address topic may be found here.