Dangerously Irrelevant

Video - Time to listen

I ran across a great video by Richard Armand, the Mesquite (TX) Independent School District Administrative Officer for Technology. I have added it to the Moving Forward wiki.

You can view the video online or download it for presentations. I have a group next week for whom this will be perfect. Nice work, Richard!

What's the best way to ensure mastery of low-level content?

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

State and federal accountability schemes require that students master low-level academic content. Our decisions regarding how we structure our instruction to facilitate student mastery of that content strike to the very heart of what we believe about teaching and learning. To facilitate conversations about this issue, I made a short video:

What do you believe is the best way to structure instruction to ensure student content mastery?

Music credit: Safe Passage, Freeplay Music

Best online resources for information and/or media literacy?

Last week I had a brand new middle school teacher ask me what the best online resources were for learning about (and teaching about) information literacy and/or media literacy. Since this isn’t the world I live in on a regular basis, I thought I’d throw the question out to you. What sites do you find valuable related to this topic?

It's the first day of school (2008)! - Survey update

So far 85 people have completed the online survey version of the Beginning of the Year Technology Checklist. Initial results are very interesting…

If you haven’t yet completed the survey and would like to do so, it will remain open through this Friday.

Subscription via e-mail; Trying to reduce corporate PR pitches

I realized that in two years I had never added a link to subscribe to Dangerously Irrelevant via e-mail. LeaderTalk has had such a link since its inception. So I created one in Feedburner. Clicking on the Subscribe via e-mail link takes you to a web page where you can enter your e-mail address. Hopefully this will be a good option for administrators and others who aren’t ready yet for a RSS reader.

I also added this blurb to the navigation menu:

I rarely look at for-profit PR pitches. If you send me something, please ensure that it relates to the topics of this blog: technology, leadership, and/or school reform.

Hopefully this will cut down on the number of unsolicited publicity requests I receive from corporations touting their latest miracle initiative for schools. I know they’re well meaning – and I recognize that the initiatives actually do some good – but I think that most of the projects just tinker at the margins and basically are more about the corporations than the schools. This is not a surprise, of course. Thoughtful corporate assistance to schools that makes a real difference still is hard to find. If you know of any such projects, please share them with the rest of us (and tell us why you think they’re making a difference so that we know you’re not just a corporate shill)!

Shocking Economics 2008

I’m not quite sure what to make of this Shocking Economics 2008 video but it’s definitely thought-provoking. Sources are available at the American Freedom University web site. Happy viewing!

It's the first day of school (2008)!

It’s the first day of school here in Ames, Iowa. The past two years at this time, I’ve posted the following checklist, wondering if schools have made any improvement since the previous fall. This year I changed the checkboxes to a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) and thought I’d try something a little different…

You have two ways to participate…

1. Download this checklist in Excel. Enter the name of your school organization and fill in your ratings (editable areas are in yellow). Click on the Chart tab at the bottom, then print. Disseminate broadly!
2. Participate in the 2-minute online survey. Fill in your ratings and click on the Submit button. I’ll publish everyone’s aggregated results in a future post! (deadline: Friday, August 29, 2008)

Feel free to use and distribute the Excel file and/or the survey link as desired. If you would like to conduct this online survey within your school organization, contact me about hosting a version just for you (at no cost). Hope you made some progress since last year!

Roll the dice!

We have a bunch of crazy dice at our house, including fractions dice, decimal dice, money dice, alien dice, dice with colored dots on them, and dice within dice. We also have a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons dice from a toy store in Duluth, Minnesota. Instead of six sides, those dice have four, eight, ten, twelve, and even twenty sides.

Yesterday I found my kids playing Monopoly with the crazy dice. If they paid $5 to the bank, they got to use one of the crazy dice. If they paid $10, they got to use two. If they used a die with a color dot, they got to move to the set of properties with that color.

Kids don’t need us to ‘train them’ to be creative. They just need permission, space for their creativity to blossom, and maybe a little active encouragement and/or nurturing of their creative spirits.

Roll the dice and see what happens!

From the head of Zeus

Most schools currently expect students to somehow (maybe magically?) be responsible, successful digital citizens upon graduation from high school - able to navigate all of the intricacies of a digital, global world - despite having little to no opportunity to learn or meaningfully practice what that means during their 12+ years of schooling.

Continuing my analogy from my previous post, we have to stop pretending that students are like Athena, able to burst forth fully-formed from the head of Zeus (or the cocoon of schools), ready to successfully function in a complex adult world without prior practice or experience.

Apathy, distrust, and nonparticipation

Linda Fandel’s blog at The Des Moines Register is focused on “world class schools for Iowa.” Kudos to her and the Register for devoting time and attention to this issue.

In a recent guest post advocating better civics instruction, former U.S. Senator John Culver said:

Many young people leave school lacking even a rudimentary understanding of how their government works and how it affects their lives. This lack of understanding leads to a lack of interest, a lack of trust and a lack of participation.

In my comment to his post, I said:

Another reason that students lack interest, trust, or participation in governmental affairs is that many of them are quite cynical about whether Constitutional freedoms even exist. As a 2003 report from the First Amendment Center noted, “Students will not learn the lessons of democracy if they cannot experience firsthand the freedom to make their own choices.” And yet so much of school (and, let’s be honest, home) is about control and lack of trust. Few students get a chance to meaningfully participate in decision-making about their own learning. School restrictions (and accompanying lawsuits) regarding student speech, expression, and behavior have escalated over the past few decades.

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, ruling for the majority in West Virginia v. Barnette, said that the Court must ensure “scrupulous protection of constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.” Why would we expect young people to be active, engaged citizens upon graduation when they rarely, if ever, get to see their supposed 'freedoms' at work? Are we surprised that young adults are apathetic (or is it just realistic?) when their primary interaction with government - school - is in a limiting, suppressive environment that, at every turn, tells them that their voice doesn’t matter? Unlike Athena, who was supposedly born fully-formed from the head of Zeus, our students need practice with both the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship before they graduate if we are to accomplish our desire to have an interested, involved citizenry.

What do you think? Do students get adequate opportunities in schools to see their Constitutional rights and responsibilities at work?

Help wanted: Moving Forward classroom wiki and podcast projects

Although we need some more lists of subject-specific blogs (which I’ll work on in future posts), the blogs page of the Moving Forward wiki is basically a pretty solid resource right now. The wiki and podcast pages, however, could use some work…

If you know of an exemplary K-12 classroom wiki or podcast project, would you add the link to the appropriate wiki page?

• Classroom wiki projects
• Classroom podcast projects

Thanks!

[The Moving Forward wiki houses a collection of resources to help presenters and change agents as they help move schools and universities forward into the 21st century. If you have a resource to add, please do so!]

Happy 2nd birthday!

I am pleased to say that 694 posts (and 3,019 comments) later, Dangerously Irrelevant is 2 years old today. I can hardly believe it's been 730 days since my first post. Thanks, everyone, for all of your good cheer and support!

Heading to Vermont

Inspired by Cory Plough's post about his meetup and presentation with Kelly Dumont, I'm going to try and do a better job of letting people know when I might be in their area...

Today I'm flying East to facilitate the three-day technology leadership strand at the Vermont Principals' Association's Annual Leadership Academy. I'll be there through Thursday morning. If anyone's in the vicinity of Mt. Snow, Vermont, let me know!

Video games and learning: Individualization, simulation, and complexity

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

In my post for LeaderTalk this month, I’m going to quickly address three ideas related to video games, schools, and learning and offer a short wrap-up at the end…

1. Individualization of learning

The artificial intelligence engines that drive most video games are able to customize the learning experience for each individual player. In other words, the game you play is different than the game I play because we have different skills and knowledge and because we make different choices during the game. The gaming engine adjusts to our differences, providing each of us with a learning experience that is both unique and optimally challenging for us as individuals. That’s a pretty powerful argument for considering the use of video games in education. As I said in a post long ago:

Video games are structured so that learners constantly operate at the outer edge of their competence. Participants are continually challenged but the challenges are not so difficult that learners believe they are undoable. [Dr. James] Gee refers to this as the regime of competence principle. Lev Vygotsky, a famous developmental psychologist, called this concept the zone of proximal development - the area in which students are ready to grow. Video games are similar to teachers in that they take the role of what Vygotsky called the 'more knowledgeable other,' the entity that helps students bridge the gap between their current ability and new capabilities. In education, we often call this scaffolding - the idea that learners can progress to new skill levels with structured, individualized, just-in-time assistance. Video games are very adept at scaffolding participants' learning. One of the reasons that video games are so compelling / engaging / 'addictive' is that participants are continually faced with new challenges that are neither too easy nor too difficult. This motivates them to move forward because the next step is always in sight and is perceived as being achievable.

We can foresee a day in the hopefully-not-too-distant future when all students have laptops and teachers, rather than seeing video games as competitors for their students’ attention, will instead have a wide variety of powerful educational video games available to them. Teachers then will be able to work individually with one group of students while other student groups move forward with the help of meaningful, substantive (not simplistic drill-and-kill) gaming software. Voila! The age-old dilemma of effective classroom differentiation just got a huge boost of assistance!

2. Simulation of authentic experience

The sight and sound capabilities of today’s video games are increasingly realistic. Video game designers are getting better and better at reproducing reality through the use of sounds, images, and videos. Corporations, governments, and the military all are using video gaming engines to produce simulations for employee training. As I said in another post from my gaming series a while back:

As the educational and/or ‘serious’ games movement grows, we will begin to see complex, realistic, accurate simulations of ancient civilizations (e.g., Colonial Williamsburg, the Maya, Great Zimbabwe), historical events (e.g., the Pelopponesian War, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Long March), scientific and mathematical processes (e.g., space exploration, Archimedean physics, Euclidean geometry), and the like. I am looking forward to this day. Right now even the most popular education-oriented games (e.g., Reader Rabbit, JumpStart, Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?) have been notably simplistic compared to commercial virtual worlds such as Second Life, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft. I believe that education-oriented simulations will be much better at stimulating deeper, richer learning than the textbooks, videos, and learning games of today. It’s hard to argue that making authentic decisions in the role of a pharaoh or a slave or a farmer, while immersed in the realistic sights, sounds, and activities of ancient Egypt, wouldn’t be a better, more meaningful, and more permanent learning experience than merely reading a few textbook pages, seeing a few pictures, answering some “drill-and-kill” multiple choice questions on the computer, or watching a short video on the subject.

Reframing video gaming technologies as productive simulations rather than time-wasting games will go a long way toward fostering acceptance among educators. Simulations have a long history of use in K-12 classrooms. What today’s gaming technologies allow us to do is to create simulations that enable learners to do the actual work - and make the actual decisions – of whatever profession or society we wish (past, present, or future). This, of course, makes them incredibly authentic learning experiences and is why their use is skyrocketing in the professional world.

3. Intellectual complexity

Many advocates of video games in education focus on the fact that children find them engaging. They’re fun and they take advantage of powerful learning principles as described above. But one aspect that often gets neglected, I believe, is the fact that most good video games are pretty complex. As The New Yorker noted in its review of Steven Johnson’s book, Everything Bad Is Good For You:

Most of the people who denounce video games … haven’t actually played them - at least, not recently. Twenty years ago, games like Tetris or Pac-Man were simple exercises in motor coördination and pattern recognition. Today’s games belong to another realm. Johnson points out that one of the “walk-throughs” for “Grand Theft Auto III” - that is, the informal guides that break down the games and help players navigate their complexities - is fifty-three thousand words long, about the length of his book. The contemporary video game involves a fully realized imaginary world, dense with detail and levels of complexity.

Indeed, video games are not games in the sense of those pastimes - like Monopoly or gin rummy or chess - which most of us grew up with. They don’t have a set of unambiguous rules that have to be learned and then followed during the course of play. This is why many of us find modern video games baffling: we’re not used to being in a situation where we have to figure out what to do. We think we only have to learn how to press the buttons faster. But these games withhold critical information from the player. Players have to explore and sort through hypotheses in order to make sense of the game’s environment, which is why a modern video game can take forty hours to complete. Far from being engines of instant gratification, as they are often described, video games are actually, Johnson writes, “all about delayed gratification - sometimes so long delayed that you wonder if the gratification is ever going to show.”

At the same time, players are required to manage a dizzying array of information and options. The game presents the player with a series of puzzles, and you can’t succeed at the game simply by solving the puzzles one at a time. You have to craft a longer-term strategy, in order to juggle and coordinate competing interests. In denigrating the video game, Johnson argues, we have confused it with other phenomena in teen-age life, like multitasking - simultaneously e-mailing and listening to music and talking on the telephone and surfing the Internet. Playing a video game is, in fact, an exercise in “constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence,” he writes. “It’s about finding order and meaning in the world, and making decisions that help create that order.”

If you talk to gamers, they will tell you that one of the key attractions of their video games is the complexity of their activities. Dr. Henry Jenkins at MIT has said that:

The worst thing a kid can say about homework is that it is too hard. The worst thing a kid can say about a video game is that it's too easy.

Wrap-up

When our students, nearly all of whom have grown up immersed in video game experiences, complain about school not being interesting or engaging, they’re not just looking to be entertained (as many teachers claim). They’re looking for learning experiences like they have at home that are individualized, authentic, and intellectually complex. Figuring out how to make that happen in our K-12 classrooms is the challenge for us as leaders as we consider what forms 21st-century learning environments need to take.

Contest - Technology poem / song

Okay, I’ve got one more contest in me this summer... As usual, the winner gets everlasting fame and a CASTLE mug. I’ll also throw in three great books: It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools, Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope, and The Emergency Teacher: The Inspirational Story of a New Teacher in an Inner City School.

Technology poem / song contest!

Create a technology-related (or, even better, an educational technology-related) poem or song. It can be a short piece (limerick, sonnet, a single verse or chorus) or something longer (anyone up for a ballad?). It doesn’t have to rhyme…

Here’s a poem example:

Haiku

Error messages.
Twitter, please buy more servers.
Followers miss me.

Here’s a song example:

[sing to Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others, The Smiths]

iPhones are better than others.
iPhones are better than others.
I haaave an iPhone,
and you don’t have one, you loser.

I know you can do better than these!

Guidelines

• Submit your entry as a comment to this blog post. Your comment can be the entry itself or it can be a link back to your blog or web site.
• Multiple entries are welcome.
• Extra points for creativity, humor, cleverness, etc.
• Feel free to use the image above to spread the word about the contest (click on it for a larger version).
• You’ve got about a week and a half. Entry deadline is midnight, August 13, 2008.

Can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Contest - 140-character book reviews - We have a winner!

Well, it was a close competition but we have a winner in the 140–character book review contest:

Workers are promoted to their level of incompetence. Explains School Administration [The Peter Principle]

Congratulations to Ted Sakshaug, winner of everlasting fame and a CASTLE mug. Ted, I’m not sure I like you making fun of all of those administrators I work with but the people have spoken!

Many thanks to everyone who submitted an entry and/or voted in the contest!