Authentic Doing in Education

I recently read A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age by Daniel H. Pink. It’s fascinating book that builds off of Freidman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century’s concerns about the changing nature of economic competition. But what prompts this self-reflection is a synthesis of my physical fatigue (reading, eye strain) and the desire to switch modes in input—on the fly—to listening and/or watching. This desire of flexibility to control how I choose to absorb new information—whether it be textual, auditory, or visual—is heartfelt, and in part results from a modern perception of frustration that all modes are not immediately available to me. This frustration is born out of my knowledge that there is very little standing in the way of making these options available, that is, there is no technical reason why information today can’t nearly always be delivered—simultaneously—in multiple forms. Yes, in growing numbers of cases one can purchase the audio-version of a book; the availability is rapidly increasing as cost continues to drop. However, I believe the choice one has to make—between text or audio—will eventually disappear; in the near future the “reader” will have the option to read, watch and listen, and to control this mode of information absorption dependent on a complex and ever changing interplay between, learning style, input fatigue, and the immediate nature of the information at the moment.

Our oral history project, Telling Their Stories: Oral History Archives Project is actually a wonderful model of this, right now! The user can choose to read, or to listen, or to read and listen, or listen and watch, paragraph by paragraph. Perhaps Telling Their Stories is a foreshadowing of the coming future in how one accesses new information.

The tactile book itself will not disappear, nor will the written word become any less important because text is still the most effective and efficient means for most of us. Text allows us to move much faster than the spoken word, and it allows us to move as slow as we want/need to absorb the subtleties, complexities, and beauty of the author’s words. But it also confines us to a single mode. And more importantly, information that is only available via text results in many students—for all sorts of reasons—to either prematurely stop, or inadequately skim, or even never attempt “the read” because, for them—at the moment—it is not the effective means of contact.

A letter I sent to Joan Ryan of the San Francisco Chronicle about today’s article.

Joan -

Thank you for helping to expose the hypocrisy of the College Board’s actions in limiting the opportunities of students to effectively convey their learning and understanding. As one who works with students everyday, as well as with the teachers who strive to find new ways to EXPAND opportunities for students to both learn and express their learning, I find it troubling that the nation’s effective monopolistic college sorting system continues to handicap students who do not fall within their defined traditional norm of textual learners.

The most troubling feature you mention is the Board’s refusal to allow this student—and thousands of others—to use technology to enhance their ability to be successful on the test. This extends beyond the irrefutable evidence that many of us think more clearly and process information more quickly when typing, or for that matter, speaking.

Perhaps the biggest challenge to those labeled as “learning disabled” is the reading section of the test. New technologies, such as text-to-voice capabilities, are helping our students choose the best form of “information absorption” to assure improved access to material. Tests, such as the SAT, attempt to measure reading comprehension. However, students who struggle with visual processing—and this extends far beyond just those with diagnosed dyslexia—are already at a huge disadvantage in simply acquiring the information. Comprehension should be a measure of understanding, context, and subtleties of the text, and NOT a measure of raw reading ability. All of us who work for and with students—from the classroom teacher to the College Board—should do everything in our power to help break down the barriers to learning. Technology plays a pivotal role in expanding the opportunities for students. Keyboarding, spelling and grammar prompts, text-to-speech, and speech-text are but a few tools that support both student learning and the measurement of student learning. It’s time for the College Board—and for that matter, all of us interested in supporting student learning—to do everything in their power to expand the opportunities for student success.

Thank you again for highlighting this in today’s article.

Howard

PS - my spell-check program helped me eliminate 6 misspelled words.

I’m often posed questions from teachers such as: “How can I use more technology in my teaching?” My response is always to leave “tech” out of the question and instead examine your own curricular needs and desires. What follows is a note I wrote to one of our English teachers responding to a similar question above.

Where are students struggling? In what areas can they be pushed further?
What are your own frustrations in the communication process with students and/or between students re: course-related discussions, sharing and dissemination of ideas?
If you could wave a magic wand engage your students in something you only dreamt about - what would that be?
Are you interested in strengthening (or overhauling) the way students analyze and evaluate each other’s work and ideas?
Do you have ideas of engaging them with other students in other areas/states/countries?
Are you interested in connecting your students with grad students as writing mentors? Engaging them with younger students?
Are you interested in having students construct knowledge that is meaningful to others?
What about creating a web of writing prompts via websites, sounds, images?
Student publishing of their creative work?
Team or whole class-based project creation—similar to Telling Their Stories?
Is there any interest/room in the curriculum to have students conducting interviews with local writers, playwrights, poets, artists, composers, etc?

The bottom line is not to think about tech but rather consider potentials unattempted or unperfected in your own teaching and curriculum development work, Then, perhaps, there is a solution that I can help direct you. To me, the two most powerful uses of technology are:

1. Everyday, ordinary reliance on the tool (writing, reading, and creating) becoming “normalized.”
2. Opportunities to do something powerful and meaningful that in earlier times would have been considered utopian, or at best, impossible, such as student conducted oral history that is then published to a world-wide audience as a primary source.

At Urban we do not block these sites nor have any plan to do such. There is no question that a large number of our students—perhaps the majority—maintain pages on journaling sites, but our policies are clear within the classroom and we try to protect our students limited amount of free time. To us it comes down to a few questions:

Is the activity interfering in the classroom (including AIM, games, etc)?
We treat this like any distraction issue that needs to be monitored and controlled by teachers. Attentive students are not accessing MySpace, surfing the web, reading comics or passing notes to each other.

Is the activity illegal?
Thus we block filesharing services that are used predominantly for illegal copyright sharing.

Does the activity violate our acceptable use policy?
In this case, this is similar to prohibiting access to pornography and other types of inappropriate sites, of which we prohibit, but do not physically block access. We can periodically monitor for violations. This is in the realm of building trust, developing a sense of responsibility, and the practicalities of the negative impact of filtering. In terms of journaling sites, we will not judge—carte blanche—that student use of MySpace is inappropriate, but rather we strive to help students exercise good judgement.

All that said, online journaling is a cultural phenomenon that will not be extinguished by banning it’s use. We are deeply interested and involved in this and other related issues. We are a small independent school where deep secrets generally rise to the surface rapidly. If students are using journaling sites to attack other students or teachers, we generally find out and are able to deal with these issues. Students for the most part self-supervise—in part, I believe—due to their enormous access to communication tools via their laptops, school online conferences, and an ingrained habit of online communication at Urban. In other words, they get a lot of practice under the eyes of adults WITHIN the schools electronic systems, and therefore, perhaps they take this with them a tad bit more when venturing outside in areas where the school has no direct control.

Way back in the medieval age of lab-based computing, we banned games and gaming. The logic of such was quite simple: computers were treated as a limited resource and therefore it was an easy argument to enforce academic use only. Stepping forward to the new millennium (5 years later), we shed all prohibitions of use other than those which violate our Use Agreement (generally actions that are illegal). Class time is obviously a different story—this is the teacher’s domain and of course no one allows gaming. I’m not saying it does not happen. How many of us snuck Sports Illustrated—or worse—behind our history textbook during “study periods?” Legislating “attention” rarely works except for those who are already attending.

I’ve led approx 40 tours of visiting educators to Urban who want to see a laptop program in action—many of whom expect to see solo-gaming running rampant—and most leave a bit shocked to realize that relatively few are doing this, even during their break times. The vast majority of our students have games loaded, BUT, then again, the vast majority are serious students whose primary focus is a combination of academics and social interactions and not burying themselves in gaming solitude.

That said, there is an important minority—who tend to be socially awkward male 9th graders—who quickly enter the radar of a slew of adults (techs, teachers, advisors, deans, counselors and parents). This is the power of all our schools: small, personal, independent organizations who excel at knowing their students and building nurturing relationships. Telling students that they can not play games on their personal laptops in their own free time is like legislating against doodling, reading comic books, playing solitaire, writing romance novels, or just daydreaming about rollercoasters.

The role of our adult advisor/mentors is significant for they are likely the better target of discussion on ways to help students mature and move on to natural attentiveness.