End Year One.

If I had written my own hindsight 20/20 Chinese fortune for that July 4th, 2010 blog post, it would not have been “You are about to embark on a most delightful journey.”

Interesting? Fatiguing? Humbling? Mountainous? Definitely. But delightful?

School choir concerts are delightful. Orchids are delightful. A nice old vine zinfandel with some imported dark chocolate on the side is delightful. Working on a Ph.D. while working a full time job? Perhaps a teeny bit delightful. But not the first word that would have come to mind.

Let us review. In the past months I’ve watched innumerable video lectures on ANOVAS and ANCOVAS; pored over foreign SPSS output; played mental hide-and-seek with assumptions I understood one moment but lost the next; parsed, transformed, and parsed again the columns of data collected from 200 very real 6th graders in a very messy middle school; clumsily conjured a research report to explain that mess; and finally helped present its entirely inconclusive results to my classmates. Statistics is no longer Greek to me; more like Italian (I was a French minor). On the other hand, I have become quite well-versed in the affordances and constraints of action research–the kind involving real live people in the places they actually inhabit.

If you asked me a year ago where I would be today, I could not have answered you. I had no idea what this program would entail, what kind of juggling act awaited this teacher-librarian-mother-wife-student-researcher-change agent. My hat rack does not have enough hooks, and the cognitive load of multi-tasking has most certainly strained my 40-something neural networks. And yet, I have produced a fairly substantial collection of work considering the time constraints, and I am proud of it. Sustaining effort has been difficult, but I can tell you plainly: this was my best.

If you ask me where I will be a year from now, I will answer that the notion is only slightly less vague than it was a year ago. I am perhaps better prepared for mystery and surprise, but the future is more opaque than transparent. I have met wonderful instructors, advisors, mentors, and colleagues whom I am eager to know better. I have a clear interest, I think I know where to go to learn about it, and I know the limitations of my professional setting. I hope these will lead me toward and through a practicum of value, but I am not a betting woman, so I will place none. Instead I remain curious, committed, and open to possibility.

No, today I would not choose “delightful.” But the journey continues. And despite my weariness, I am smiling. Yes, it has been interesting and fatiguing and humbling and mountainous. Maybe a little delightful. But more than anything, fortunate.

I’ve been spending more time on Facebook lately.

Mostly because, as a K-12 public school educator, I’m taking a beating. In 21 years I’ve seen plenty of education policy come and go, but never have I felt like this. And when you’re not feeling strong, doesn’t everybody need a friend to lean on?

In fact, I need therapy. I need to massage my bruised ego in the wake of school reform tying teacher evaluation and pay to test scores. I need to be counseled through the supplanting of authentic assessment with quarterly bubble tests to be quantified, analyzed, and disaggregated for offering to the data gods. I need to collectively nurse deep cuts to school funding and take refuge from teacher-bashing by politicians wearing agenda-goggles and disgruntled taxpayers wearing Revolutionary War garb.  My colleagues and I are having difficulty retaining a positive view of ourselves. Yeah, we got the blues.

Enter Facebook.

Here in Facebook therapy I share feelings, exchange pats on the pack, post activist stories, and laugh with digital comrades when Stewart and Colbert defend my honor. I connect with those who understand —and some who do not. With critic-friends I debate and question and sometimes disagree. Facebook has become my arena for civic engagement with those I wouldn’t normally draw into political conversation, either because I’m too tired or too cautious or too well-trained in polite conversation. Even when they’re my relatives. Facebook is group therapy and town hall meeting, all rolled into one.

So, when I surfed into last month’s results of a study by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, I took note. The study tracked 400 youth over several years and surveyed 2500 to determine the impact of Internet use on civic engagement. Researchers examined “politically-driven online participation, online exposure to diverse perspectives, and interest-driven online participation.”  Although results were mixed, it seems online participation may encourage offline civic engagement, and that teaching digital media literacy can positively influence the nature of students’ online interactions. Facebook really does that?, I thought as I posted the link to the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action site.

And all of this against the background of digitally connected Middle Eastern youth in the throes of revolution, utilizing the power of social networking in pursuit of civic ideals. Even James Fallows, while mourning the death of traditional journalism in this month’s Atlantic article entitled “Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media” admits, “Even a year ago it would have been hard to imagine how thoroughly, and with what combination of media, voices, and judgements an event in an Arab capital could have been witnessed around the world.”

Perhaps social networks insulate some people in echo chambers of isolation.  But I don’t think it has to be. It might also be that the common ground we locate with those who share our beliefs, enhanced by exchanges with those outside our spheres of interest, make social networks simultaneously reassuring and edifying and intellectually engaging. Perhaps  passionate engagement can be co-opted to edge our students through digital media toward global- and civic-mindedness.

Not to mention we’re all in need of a little group therapy now and then.

Ehrlich, P. R. (2000). Human Natures: Genes Cultures and the Human Prospect. Shearwater Books, USA.

Who are we, really?

The question has vexed philosophers, poets, scientists and theologians for millenia. It is etched on the outside of a Pandora’s box from which, upon opening, flood more and more perplexing questions:  Where did we come from? How are we different from other animals? How are we different from each other? How are we similar? How must we conduct ourselves? To what extent do we control our lives? Where are we going?

Paul Ehrlich and Jared Diamond tackle some of these questions in their respective books, Human Natures and Guns, Germs, and Steel. Their perspectives are evolutionary–they are scientists seeking rational, substantiated answers. Both convincingly argue that humans are first and foremost the products of their environments.

In the case of Diamond, geography is the environmental factor of note. It is the ultimate source of disparity between continents of human prosperity and poverty. Diamond argues that those of us lucky enough to have inherited plants and animals that could be viably domesticated, on continents with a geographic orientation east-west rather than north-south, and who were not constrained by isolating geographic features inherited a prize package placing them first on the road to complex societies and affluence. Those whose environments did not provide this prize package faced slower cultural evolution and, as in the case of Native Americans, near extermination from disease or onslaughts against which their histories did not provide a defense. Here the evolution we speak of is primarily cultural, not genetic. Diamond is careful to note that genetic evolution happens much too slowly to have resulted in any significant differences in the gene package inherited by one human group or another, and that differences within human groups are much greater than differences between us. Racial differences (as biologically minimal as they are) cannot account for the differences between the wealth and prosperity of Europe and North America and the poverty of certain regions of Africa or Southeast Asia. It is the inheritance of geography that accounts for that difference. Here I am reminded how the diverse environments of my students impact their selfhood. The physical worlds we inhabit certainly shape us, both collectively and individually.

Ehrlich provides an overview of natural selection and recounts how that process shaped the development of earlier ape-like species into homo sapians. In the first portion of his book, the emphasis is on the genetic evolution of the species as a result of environmental selection. This discussion takes the reader chronologically through the Great Leap Forward (approximately 50,000 years ago), to the very important birth of agriculture (approximately 10,000 years ago) and the explosive advances resulting from it, including population growth, the emergence of language, religion, art, cities, and eventually stratified societies. Like Diamond, Ehrlich emphasizes the important distinction between biological evolution (which happens genetically over many, many generations) and cultural evolution (which can happen quite rapidly as a result of environmental factors). The diversity of cultures existing today results from the complex interaction of humans with each other and with their natural environments, not from genetic differences between cultural groups.

But as fascinating is the study of past humans, it is of greatest value in what it teaches about humans today and tomorrow. So, I find the final two chapters of Ehrlich’s book the most compelling. As a teacher my ends are fairly clear to me: teach students to think critically about their world, seek solutions to world problems, develop themselves as social contributors, and live meaningful lives. But as a student of technology, what are my ends? Are my goals as an educator in conflict with the wholesale advocacy of technology in all aspects of human life? I think Ehrlich would say yes. After all, ubiquitous technology places huge demands on the environment. Think of the power required to produce and run our gadgets, the waste of continually replacing them with “upgraded” versions and disposing of the old in ever-growing trash heaps. Likewise, if we are programmed to interact in small groups of roughly 150 people, how is the casual addition of hundreds of Facebook friends to my profile not in opposition to my nature? And if most of my time is spent interacting virtually with them, how will I nurture the small community in which I am genetically evolved to thrive? If my emotional, physical, or professional existence is so completely dependent on my computer, my television, my dishwasher, my Interactive white board, or my Skype connection, what will I do when the lights go out?

Yet, my presence in the first-ever hybrid EPET program at MSU attests to my belief that technology is not a sure road to human ruin. Technology places within my students’ reach more information than humans have ever had access to. It shortens the distance between the continents, providing real world connections between their prosperous culture and less affluent ones. It inundates their formative visual perception with images of humans who, although they look different, share universal human tendencies. It helps us all to see how our actions on one side of the globe affect the lives of those on the other side. And it can potentially provide that information to almost anyone, whatever their location or social status. Diamond and Ehrlich remind me, however, that neither is it without risk. Like many advancements in human history, it is a tool with potential for destruction or progress. And in any case, it is already with us; turning back the cultural clock is not an option. The question is how we will manage this new development.

Evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould retained an optimism about the human condition that I share:

Contingency is rich and fascinating; it embodies an exquisite tension between the power of individuals to modify history and the intelligible limits set by laws of nature. The details of individual and species’ lives are not mere frills, without power to shape the large-scale course of events, but particulars that can alter entire futures, profoundly and forever (p. 77).*

I am an evolutionist who believes humans have the power to change our natures. As an educator, I am in the business of altering particulars. If technology is both the result of cultural evolution and an impetus of further evolutionary change, and if we have the intellectual capacity to influence the evolutionary direction of our species, then we can choose to utilize technology toward the humane goals of sustainability, equality, and quality of life–and teach the next generation to do the same.

*Gould, S.J. (1993). Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History. W.W. Norton & Co.

Christensen, C. M., Johnson, C. W., & Horn, M. B. (2008). Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. McGraw-Hill.

In the opening paragraphs of Disrupting Class Clayton Christensen, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University, outlines four aspirations Americans have for schools. We seek to “maximize human potential,” to “facilitate a vibrant and informed electorate” capable of critical thinking, to prepare students to “help our economy remain prosperous and economically competitive,” and to “nurture…respect” for differences among us (p. 1). Few would argue that these are not commendable goals. Likewise, Larry Cuban, Professor of Education at Stanford University, recounts in Oversold and Underused that American schools have traditionally been expected to “build citizens, promote equality, cultivate the moral and social development of individual students, and bind diverse groups into one nation” (p. 7). Added now is the expectation that schools “build the human capital…essential to sustaining technological innovation and global competitiveness” (p. 10). The two authors seem to agree on the purposes of American education. But appearances can be deceiving.

Christensen’s thesis is that his Theory of Disruptive Innovation, originally conceived as a business strategy, must be applied to education if lasting reform is to happen. Disruptive Innovation occurs when an existing service or product emerges on a “new plane of competition” (p. 47) and establishes itself by creating an entirely new market completely outside the internal organization offering the traditional service. In education this means that classes are delivered completely outside traditional school structures and fulfills needs that cannot be met any other way. Christensen’s book is a manifesto for charter and virtual schools, both of which establish a new architecture for educational delivery disconnected from traditional schools. He argues that only through such “disruptive” external methods can change happen.

Christensen’s choice of vocabulary in describing Disruptive Innovation in education is revealing. He notes that “there is vast nonconsumption of AP courses” in many schools (p. 92), that this presents an “ideal market” (p. 93) for the “computer-based learning industry” (p.123). Likewise, cuts to extracurriculars create a “diminishing supply” of such courses, leading to “growing nonconsumption” (p. 93). The “classic foothold market” of home schoolers and “nonconsumption opportunities” in credit recovery are “revolutionary opportunities” creating a “booming market” for “for-profit compan(ies)” like Apex Learning (p. 95), whose “growth path … is to figure out how to teach more courses more effectively” (p. 104). Students, he asserts, will “pull-market” their educations much like consumers of pharmaceuticals have done since they began self-diagnosing their illnesses with the help of direct-to-consumer advertising (p. 139). Important also, he asserts, is the disruption of regulated markets, exemplified by the deregulation of the banking industry which compelled Merrill Lynch to introduce its profitable interest-bearing cash management account and allowed the emergence of “efficient, safe markets… by circumventing regulation” (p.142). Three years later, a Great Recession caused by massive banking scandals and a health care crisis exacerbated by rampant pharmaceutical costs are two results of such deregulation. For my part, the thought of applying such policies to education is just plain frightening. And I suspect Cuban would agree. Christensen’s proposal is a perfect example of what Cuban criticizes as “private sector management…solving the problems of schools.” Cuban describes a “wholesale embrace of market competition” in which everything educational is for sale and good citizenship is nothing more than good consumerism (p. 11). Cuban, it seems, has identified the likes of Christensen even before the latter’s book was written.

In fact, Cuban has identified much of what vexes the effective adoption of technology in schools, and Christensen serves effectively to exemplify those problems. According to Cuban, the perceived failure of technology integration may simply be wrong. A slow revolution may be happening, but “meaningful transformations have often taken decades rather than a few months or years” (p. 154). Like the adoption of technology in many professions such as engineering and medicine attests, it takes time (p. 151). On the other hand, Christensen’s impatience for such realities is evident in his optimistic assertion that by 2014 25% of high school classes will be online (p. 143); 50% will be “computer-based” by 2019 (p. 98). What that means we never really know; Christensen asserts over and over that “computer-based learning” is the magic bullet for meeting the needs of students with individual intelligences (a disputed theory itself), but, beyond fictional examples of students watching videos of Jaime Escalante (p. 83) or taking online foreign language classes (suggested in the vapid fictional narratives introducing each chapter), he never defines what “computer-based learning” is.

Cuban’s second explanation for the apparent failure of computers to catch on in education involves the many restraints realistically facing teachers. They are seldom involved in decision-making. In addition, they are stymied by standarized testing, structured school days, lack of reliable technology, lack of time for selecting and learning technology, and “rampant featurism” resulting from the tech industry’s need to continually sell more complex updates. Seldom are teachers asked what they need (p. 165). And teachers easily recognize the hard-sell of technology to policy-makers seeking “symbolic political gestures” (p. 158). Two pages into Christensen’s acknowledgements I questioned how many years of K-12 teaching experience was represented by the list of people contributing to his book. From what I could glean in a few Google searches, his list of over 30 primary contributors boasts a total of about 10 years. Those contributors have ties to at least a half dozen for-profit educational or consulting companies. Here, it seems, is a perfect example of teachers not having much say in how reform happens while businessmen seeking new earning opportunities present grand plans for profitable reform.

Finally, Cuban concludes that teachers, who are the “gatekeepers” of what goes on in their classrooms, practice “contextually constrained choice” in deciding what methods to incorporate and how to use them. Here Cuban recognizes an essential truth that Christensen does not: We teach for the “psychic rewards of teaching.” More than anything, we value the moments when students show a “curiosity and love of learning” (p. 169), when “emotional and intellectual exchanges occur” between ourselves and our students. We value the broad social purposes of education, the goals of civic idealism and the instillation of democratic values. In contrast, Cuban recognizes that “well-intentioned reformers eager to make schools efficient instruments of American global economic competitiveness…concentrate upon how schools serve the economy and how much individuals can gain, rather than on the public good” (p. 189-90). In Christensen’s narrow vision of an ideal classroom, the teacher spends day after day walking from computer to computer, answering questions as students “master the material in a way that is consistent with (their) way of learning” (p. 107). He boldly asserts this is the only way the student will get what she needs (though he presents no evidence for it) and that the teacher will benefit, too, because an “increase (in) the number of students per live teacher” will result in “more funds to pay teachers better” (p. 107). I hope those funds are considerable, as it will take a great deal of enticement to get smart, dedicated individuals to wander around a computer lab for 30 years.

I admit Christensen has something to offer in his suggestion that we pursue nontraditional alternatives in our efforts toward school reform; there is always room for creative thinking. But it is Cuban’s closing summary that best frames our efforts toward technology integration–that “computer-based learning” is not a magic bullet, that unqualified claims of “techno-promoters” should be carefully examined, and that a return to civic-mindedness is sorely needed in our society. Cuban’s essential question is right on target:  “In what ways can teachers use technology to create better communities and build strong citizens?” When teachers are given the opportunity to answer that question and to envision creative models for achieving it, reform will occur–not in the interest of technology itself, but in the interest of democracy, economic stability, and the common good.

“Interestingly formative.” “Intensely productive.” “Stressful but compelling.”

“An inside journey.”

One of the things I enjoy more than anything is travel. My past summers are dotted with globe-tripping. I have been to various parts of Europe eight times and to China once. People often wonder where I’m going next or where I’ve gone, and when I return to school in the fall, they follow the first question above with inquiries of my summer travels.

This year, I will say, I traveled inside.

Strange to think of it that way. I have spent about 12 hours a day for the past four weeks in a single 12 x 10 room, my upstairs office. It is in the front of the house, the first room at the top of the stairs, with windows facing the front yard and the street. From my desk it’s easy to hear the dozen-or-so neighborhood kids running from yard to yard or down to the cul-de-sac and back, yelling out instructions on where to hide, how to jump a curb, or how to get the most speed on a slip’n slide.

Yet, these have not been distractions. I was too immersed in conversations with my classmates via a Google chat or a Ning post, adding pastel highlights or margin scribbles to article after article, and prying open my creative mind to capture fuzzy notions in concrete multimedia messages . And figuring out exactly how to do all these things.  Over and over I have sat in this chair thinking, “That didn’t work. Now what do I do?” This, followed by a surprisingly calm mental roll of viable options: Google it. Youtube it. Ask a classmate. Look it up in the text. Look it up in the other text. Or the other one. Read it again. And again. Phone a friend. Email the professor. Voice my confusion out loud to someone. To the dog. Put it aside for now. Have a little chocolate. Change gears and let it simmer for awhile and see if something rises to the top.

Such have been my mental wanderings over the past four weeks. Accompanied by affective responses from misery to elation, I have traversed a mind’s worth of cognitive roads and returned with several albums’ worth of new perspectives.

All in this small room, with a strong cup of coffee, the printer humming, and the dog under the table.

Given the challenges students face in using the Internet as an information source, it isn’t surprising that they often resort to less educational practices than we would like (see this recent N.Y. Times article about plagiarism as an example). Since the library of the future probably resides on the Internet, I think it’s the job of media specialists like me to determine what’s really going on when kids utilize the Internet for information needs and to help them do it better.

Link to my video on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzG9ogxiUW4

When I began this interview I had no idea what themes it would generate. I knew only that my interest was in understanding the motivations of my 17-year-old daughter, both in and out of school. I was surprised on many levels by her honesty and insight, and as I listened again to our conversation, was struck by how many different motivational theories her answers supported. Perhaps, I thought, all of these theories are right–in different times, in different places, and to different extents. This is the final theme that emerged and that I hope is relayed in the piece.

Click here to listen:

Madelyn Interview2

We were asked this question in the hour before we returned to our messy MSU dorm rooms to check out–to pack the literal and figurative accumulations of our two-week proseminar introduction and head out alone to the frightening unknown.

It wasn’t an easy question to answer. When I am overwhelmed with new tasks,  data, information-processing, self-orienting, friendships, and expectations, meaningful revelations do not come in grand entrances. They are stealthy, creeping in around the edges of my day, stacking up in shadowy corners until I have a moment to notice them. Well, here was the moment.

Aha! Early in week two a small group of us had walked to the Phillips Hall dining room for lunch. It was a refreshingly cool June day; a bowl of soup sounded perfect. I chose the Chinese noodles and, just as I turned to leave the line, noticed a steel container of plastic-wrapped fortune cookies. What the heck, I thought.

“You are about to embark on a most delightful journey.”

No kidding; it really said that.

Aha! The journey returns! Yes, I know it’s a tired metaphor; but then, who and what in life isn’t tired? It’s part of the definition, and all the better for it. There’s no question that I have been tired these past two weeks… but I have also been energized, surprised, encouraged, and joyful. And yes, I’m overwhelmed by the demands of this journey. Thankfully, I have a decent map, fellow travelers whose company I enjoy, guides I trust, and good shoes. What traveler knows the details of every stop along the way before she leaves? Indeed, if we had our travels carved in stone before our departure, there would be no need to take the first step.

Aha! It really is a journey!