There has been much talk among the “EduWeb 2.0″ community questioning the value of formal schooling, particularly higher education. Will Richardson has written several blog posts on the subject.
While the democratization of knowledge and unlimited access to information are laudable goals, and perhaps approaching reality, I wonder about the role of expertise, specifically that resulting from “paying dues” in the learning process. Will culture contine to survive and civilization progress if everybody is equal and education is reduced to “looking stuff up” online?
Information access is no substitute for education.
Is this an educator endorsed expansion of anti-intellectualism?
Time Magazine’s columnist, Joel Stein, challenged some of these assumptions in a very witty article, Bring on The Elites. (I’ve waited a week for the entire column to appear online so I can share it with you). Here is a taste of Stein’s column.
Magazine editors and network executives make writers cut references and words they think most people won’t know — even though everybody has Wikipedia. We are becoming a country that believes the rich have earned their money but the well educated have not earned their intellectual superiority. This leads to a nation that idolizes Kardashians.
Antielitism is a cancer waiting to metastasize in any democracy and one that Alexis de Tocqueville worried about for the U.S.
I always get a bit queasy when I hear educators argue against education, including college opportunity, for all students. What do you think?
Cross-posted from the Constructing Modern Knowledge site. Web2.0pians should pay special attention to his mention of “personal learning communities.”
Educators fortunate enough to attend Constructing Modern Knowledge 2010 got to withness an amazing conversation between two of America’s most provocative and accomplished educators, Alfie Kohn and Deborah Meier (watch this site for video in the near future). Mark your calendars for a mind-blowing Constructing Modern Knowledge 2011, to be held July 11-14, 2011. Registration details will be posted here in early September.
Sign-up for news from Constructing Modern Knowledge and the Constructivist Consortium
Alfie began his CMK 2010 remarks by reading the draft of a stunning editorial he was preparing for publication in Education Week. The article, Turning Children Into Data: A Skeptic’s Guide to Assessment Programs, is a must read for any educator, parent or policy-maker who cares about children. Ken Bernstein also blogged about this article in The Daily Kos.
Kohn’s article begins with:
Programs with generic-sounding names that offer techniques for measuring (and raising) student achievement have been sprouting like fungi in a rainforest: “Learning-Focused Schools,” “Curriculum-Based Measurements,” “Professional Learning Communities,” and many others whose names include “data,” “progress,” or “RTI.” Perhaps you’ve seen their ads in periodicals like this one. Perhaps you’ve pondered the fact that they can afford these ads, presumably because of how much money they’ve already collected from struggling school districts
and then continues to list six questions that need to be asked…
- What is its basic conception of assessment?
- What is its goal?
- Does it reduce everything to numbers?
- Is it about “doing to” or “working with”?
- Is its priority to support kids’ interest?
- Does it avoid excessive assessment?
As always, Alfie supports his arguments with research-based evidence and common sense. Given the load of horse manure recently published by John Merrow and echoed by Grant Wiggins in a shocking display of contempt for teachers, Alfie Kohn’s column could not have come at a better time. Please share it widely.
Perhaps you’d like to leave a few copies around at Back-to-School Night along with his small book, The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools.
Share your comments below!
Alfie Kohn & Deborah Meier at CMK 2010
I realise that this is late notice, but I will be leading a seminar, The Best Educational Ideas in the World: Adventures on the Frontiers of Learning, 13 September 2010 in the Lecture Theatre at The University of Melbourne’s Trinity College. The seminar will be from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM and costs just $50 (US) ($58 AU). Regrettably, my registration system won’t handle Australian currency.
The seminar is intended for all P-12 teachers, tech directors, computing teachers, university students, parents and administrators.
You may register online here. Please pass this information along to colleagues & friends!!
A poster may be downloaded here.
Maps and location information may be found here.
The Best Educational Ideas in the World: Adventures on the Frontiers of Learning
Contemporary discussions of school improvement focus on the creation of obedience schools for poor children or utopian governance schemes. Neither approach does much to amplify the natural curiosity, expertise, creativity, passion, competence or capacity for intensity found in each child. A leading educator serves as your tour guide for a global exploration of powerful ideas and exemplary teaching practices.
The artificial boundaries between art and science are blurred as children engage in authentic activities with real materials, create sophisticated artifacts of personal and aesthetic value and become connected to ideas larger than themselves. Collegiality, purpose, apprenticeship, complexity, serendipity and “sharaeability” are a few of the common values. Each approach either requires digital technology or may be dramatically enhanced by it. Lessons learned en-route our tour create productive contexts for learning in which students construct the knowledge required for a rewarding life. An ample Q&A session will follow the presentation.
Stops along our tour may include:
- Personal fabrication
- Reggio Emilia
- Constructionism
- El Sistema
- 826 Valencia
- Generation YES
- One Laptop Per Child
- and even reality television!
About Gary S. Stager, Ph.D.
Since 1982, Gary Stager, an internationally recognized educator, speaker and consultant, has helped learners of all ages on six continents embrace the power of computers as intellectual laboratories and vehicles for self-expression. He led professional development in the world’s first laptop schools (1990), has designed online graduate school programs since the mid-90s, is a collaborator in the MIT Media Lab’s Future of Learning Group and a member of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s Learning Team. Mr. Stager’s doctoral research involved the creation a high-tech alternative learning environment for incarcerated at-risk teens. Recent work includes teaching and mentoring some of Australia’s “most troubled” public schools. Gary was Senior Editor of District Administration Magazine and Founding Editor of The Pulse: Education’s Place for Debate. He is currently Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University, an Associate of the Thornburg Center for Professional Development and the Executive Director of The Constructivist Consortium. In 1999, Converge Magazine named Gary a “shaper of our future and inventor of our destiny.” The National School Boards Association recognized Dr. Stager with the distinction of “20 Leaders to Watch” in 2007. The June 2010 issue of Tech & Learning Magazine named Gary Stager as “one of today’s leaders who are changing the landscape of edtech through innovation and leadership.”Dr. Stager was a keynote speaker at the 2009 National Educational Computing Conference before an audience of more than 4,000 educators. He was also a Visiting Scholar at The University of Melbourne’s Trinity College during the summer of 2009.
Recently, Gary was the new media producer for The Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri Project - Simpatíco, 2007 Grammy Award Winner for Best Latin Jazz Album of the Year. Dr. Stager is also a contributor to The Huffington Post.
I bought a couple of iPads last weekend. I’ve already shared with colleagues how although I think it will be wildly successful in K-12 for all of the wrong reasons*, I’d buy one anyway because:
1. I like new gadgets
2. I like Apple products (since 1985 – prior to that I preferred Commodore)
3. It’s my job to keep up with emerging technology
4. My best friend has one
5. I’m an adult with disposable income
I didn’t wait for the 3G model because I don’t want yet another stinkin’ AT&T bill. Had they come up with a fair plan for multiple devices, I would have jumped at it. I won’t even complain about 3G costing an extra $130 making the 64gb iPad the same price as a MacBook.
I harbored no illusions that the iPad would change my life like my laptop, iPhone or even iPod have done. Yes, the iPad is beautiful. Yes, the battery life is great. Yes, I feel less neurotic about losing or breaking it, as I do with my laptop. Now, I just have to figure out what to do with the iPad.
Go ahead. Call me an old codger, but I’ve been around eBooks/interactive books since the late 1980s. I still own a bunch of the groundbreaking Voyager Expanded Books. The Society of Mind, MacBeth, Who Built America?, The Rite of Spring, Poetry in Motion, Beethoven’s Ninth and Dazzeloids represent few of the examples of true commercial digital art ever created. It’s hard to think of any digital media that is better since those Voyager titles from nearly twenty years ago.
In 1991-92, I led countless workshops for educators on how to create their own interactive books using the Voyager Expanded Book Toolkit. Digital books would soon be widespread, right?
That said, I did not buy a Kindle because the design is ugly and I expected Apple to produce something better, an iPad perhaps? I love books. My house is filled with them. Had Amazon offered me the option of paying $2 extra and getting a digital copy of the physical book I ordered, I would have bought a Kindle. I recognize the value of carrying lots of books around in one device and the power of personal digital annotation. Whispernet is brilliant too. Anyone can use it, anywhere.
So, now I own an iPad. Oh, how I would love to use it as my primary way to read, but alas – not so fast!
Here are some of the reasons why Apple iBooks currently disappoint. I hope they get better quickly.
Steve Jobs is contemptuous of print
Mr. Jobs can be like that when he assesses the competition.
Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” (1/15/08)
Further evidence of Jobs’ contempt for print is the fact that iPad owners have to wait for their iPad to ask them, “Would you like to download iBooks?” before the application is on the device. Why doesn’t the iBooks app come pre-installed?
I won’t even raise the specter of Jobs banning books from the iBooks Store because he disagrees with the content as he has done in the physical Apple Stores.
The iBooks catalog is pathetic
Although I hope that every book ever written will soon be available for download, the Apple iBooks store doesn’t even have relatively popular recent publications in it.
I know that I can (and did) download the Kindle App for iPad, but I didn’t buy an iPad to get a Kindle. Switching between two different book readers is a drag. Sheesh!
I eagerly await word from Apple that they are just as serious about publishing books for the iPad as they were in encoding YouTube videos for the iPhone.
Jobs must know how craptacular the iBooks Store is or otherwise he would have given Amazon the “Adobe-treatment” and forbidden a Kindle app for iPad.
Jobs hates Amazon.com so much that he’s letting publishers punish us
One of Steve Job’s greatest accomplishments was getting tough with the music and video companies and forcing them to charge a fair price for audio and video via iTunes. He single-handedly broke the cartel that was raising CD and DVD prices to absurd levels.
So, what’s the first thing Jobs does regarding written content? He tells publishers to go ahead and charge anything they want, not just the reasonable $9.99 per book pricing instituted by Amazon.
iBooks cannot be annotated
I hope this obvious omission will be rectified soon via a software update. Surely, Apple would like to offer functionality customers came to expect from Hypercard 20+ years ago.
There are no magazines for subscription in the iBooks store
Surely, Apple knows that this is a potentially fertile revenue stream. I’d love to save some trees.
Amazon’s Kindle Store offers too few magazine currently. That’s still better than zero magazines available from iBooks.
Are the books I purchased backed-up in the cloud?
Unless I’ve missed it, Apple has not indicated where my purchased books reside in case something goes awry with my iPad.
Why can’t I subscribe to a podcast on my iPad?
For a super-dooper mobile media device, I would expect that I could download audio and video podcasts directly to my iPad without requiring syncing with my laptop. Why can’t I do so? Shouldn’t the iPad make me less dependent on an old-school computer?
One more funny iPad observation… Apple is a company famous for protecting its intellectual property. Therefore, it seems peculiar that iTunes automatically copies my iPhone apps for use on my iPad as well. I know that I MAY have the legal right to maintain the software of two computers as long as I’m only using it on one, but how did Apple miss the opportunity to make me buy the same software twice?
Recommended reading: Ken Auletta’s 4/26/10 New Yorker article, Publish or Perish: Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business?
* I will write an article on why the iPad is a bad choice for K-12 education at a later time.
After years of avoiding the whole sordid mess, I’ve gone an done it. I am officially on the FaceBook.
I apologize for waiting so long to announce this to the world. I’ve been way too busy friending people who beat me up in high school.
Now I have an entirely new venue in which to waste time.
Amidst the hoopla surrounding the silly tradition of naming a national “Teacher of the Year,” the President of the United States and Council of Chief State School Officers made major policy news by endorsing the unblocking of Internet access in American classrooms - all in pursuit of educational excellence!
A high school English teacher from Iowa who incorporates everything from singing to Facebook in her lessons has been recognized by President Barack Obama as the nation’s top teacher.
Obama introduced Sarah Brown Wessling on Thursday in a ceremony in the Rose Garden.
“Her students don’t just write five-paragraph essays, but they write songs, public service announcements, film story boards, even grant proposals for their own not-for-profit organizations,” the president said, adding that one of Wessling’s students reported that learning in her classroom was never boring.
“I’m not sure I could have said that when I was in school,” said Obama. (original article)
…The Council of Chief State School Officers selects the recipient of the annual honor and cited Wessling’s passion and innovative approaches, including incorporating Facebook in her classes.
So, congratulations are in order for Ms. Wessling and for every teacher in America who can now go tell their school “network nazis” that the President of the United States wants them to stop blocking the Web. Blocking Facebook and other web sites is unpatriotic!
Thank you, Mr. President!
National Public Radio’s terrific talk show, Talk of the Nation, interviewed US Education Secretary Arne Duncan this morning and sent out a tweet asking for questions worth posing to the Secretary. I immediately tweeted back a barrage of questions and the host asked a paraphrased version of one the most innocuous questions I submitted.
If goal is raising opportunities & achievement for all kids, isn’t RACE for the top an unfortunate metaphor? (1 winner, many losers)
Engaging in critical debates about Federal education policy in 140 characters is a challenge, but not impossible.
The following are the other questions I “tweeted” to Secretary Arne Duncan (in reverse chronological order) via NPR’s TOTN:
How would Sect. Duncan to respond to the report card given him - A for efficacy and D for policy?
Isn’t firing all of the teachers and charterizing public schools a right-wing utopian fantasy?
Where does Sect. Duncan think the magical teachers & perfect schools will come from after he fires teachers and closes pub schools?
Did you ask Duncan what he thinks of Diane Ravitch’s research disproving the basic assumptions of Obama education policies?
Given the Gates Foundation’s expensive school reform failures, why do they have so much influence within the Dept. of Education?
If you’re a parent in Harlem, should be concerned that nearly all of the local public schools have been turned into boutique charters?
Why should public school facilities be surrendered to private charter school operators?
Which is true: a) The Chicago Public Schools are a mess & failing children b) We should trust Sect. Duncan to do the same for America?
Should Americans be alarmed that most major city districts and the Dept. of Ed are now run by unqualified non-educators?
If goal is raising opportunities & achievement for all kids, isn’t RACE for the top an unfortunate metaphor? (1 winner, many losers)
Why has a “Labor” administration worked so hard to bust the teacher unions across the nation?
I’ll be a keynote speaker at the semi-annual Australian Conference on Educational Computing April 6-9, 2010 in my adopted 2nd hometown of Melbourne, Australia.
2010 marks my twentieth anniversary of working in Australia, beginning with the introduction of laptops into schools and ACEC was the first conference I ever keynoted back in 1992, coincidentally in Melbourne.
I’ll also be presiding over a “Breakfast with Gary Stager” workshop in which we’ll explore some of the “Best Educational Ideas in the World” on April 6th. You may register at http://acec2010.info
The organizers of the conference asked me for a video advertising my participation. It ain’t Scorsese, but here it is.
Gary Stager’s ACEC 2010 Video from Gary Stager on Vimeo.
David Warlick is the latest person to go all “digital immigrant” and proclaim that we should all take a good hard look at the hugely popular YouTube video, “A Vision of Students Today.”
Fantastic. A college class with far too many students in it (200) attempts to revolutionize the educational system by whining in a five minute web video.
I’m sorry, but count me unimpressed!
Perhaps a student should hold up a sign saying, “My professor is wasting my time and money by making me participate in a piece of exploitative propaganda in which I get to insult either my generation or the one before me just to get on YouTube.”
How did bashing our own profession become such a popular sport? What possible value could demeaning educators have in a professional development setting? Are we desperate for moving pictures or are they merely a substitute for actual ideas?
Is showing these types of videos the conference speaker equivalent of the teacher running the filmstrip to eat up class time?
One valuable lesson you should learn at university is that the world is full of people smarter than you and wondrous things to learn. This video and the mindless kudos afforded it make just the opposite point. Hey kids, you have cellphones! You’ve played Halo and excerpted someone else’s blog which in summarized someone else’s blog which excerpted an article on a magazine web site. Therefore, you are master of the universe and every educational institution should abandon scholarship, discipline and any text longer than a screen.
I’ve wanted to tell the Web 2.0pians the following for some time:
- Observation is not insight.
- Factoids are not knowledge
- Talk (in this case, mime) is cheap.
A concerned competent educator might ask, “What should Ido to make learning relevant without making it dopey or trivial?” This video offers no such guidance.
The excitement and praise afforded “A Vision of Students Today” is a clear example of what Dr. Seymour Papert called, “verbal inflation.” Apparently we should all be astonished that college students used Google Docs and then conflate such a trivial mechanical act with educational innovation.
Originally published Monday, November 05, 2007 in The Pulse: Education’s Place for Debate.
