The Once and Future Kid

In The Once and Future King, T.H. White tells the story of King Arthur, beginning in his childhood and spanning the prosperous years of Camelot to its eventual downfall. Unless you were required to read it in high school (as I was), you probably haven't read it (I wouldn't have) but it's a pretty good book. Many of you may in fact be very familiar with the first of its four sections: The Sword in the Stone (inspiration for one of the best Disney movies ever. Assuming we exclude anything by Pixar I would readily put it in their top 15).

In the Sword in the Stone section of the book, Merlin the mysterious wizard is brought to the castle where Arthur lives to give him an education. The master of the castle expects the experience to be very much like what parents today expect: Lots of sitting and listening. Silent reading. Plenty of written work. Familiar tenets of the passive, "sit and receive" theory of education.

What Arthur actually got was a radically constructivist approach to a leadership curriculum (Merlin knew where Arthur was headed in life) in which he was transformed into a variety of animals and sent to interact with other animals of that species. In the book (not the movie) he spoke with ants and saw that they were a mindless hive with no opportunity for individuality, spent the night with falcons and learned the perils of a system based too strongly on rank and social hierarchy, and swam with swans and realized that not every species must be territorial.

Arthur got all of this through experiential learning. Merlin didn't tell him what kinds of things to say or ask when he was among the animals (though he occasionally gave a tip on how not to be recognized as an outsider). Merlin even learned a lot from Arthur when "Wart" as he was called then returned and the two discussed what had been done, seen, and said.

By the by: An absolutely fantastic plot element of the book was that Merlin experienced time in reverse, so at this point in Arthur's life he had already seen everything that would happen to Camelot. It helped explained why he was a great teacher at the end of his life (the beginning of the story) but wasn't more help in stopping Camelot's downfall: at that point at the end of it all he was a largely inexperienced young man.

If I were you I would be thinking "Thanks for the Literature lesson, professor. What's he getting at?"

The Sword in the Stone section of The Once and Future King was released in the 1930s. I think it's pretty remarkable that the divide between experiential, constructivist learning and sit-listen-read learning was noted so far back that it was only a few years after the adoption of the factory system of education.

Obviously the divide still exists today and I'm going to connect it now briefly to (surprise, surprise) technology. Last week I wrote about Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) and their potential to become places of learning. As the 21st century progresses, digital video technology will become more and more robust. TVs can already display things at resolutions that are staggering. It's only a matter of time before we abandon flat screens for more immersive, 3D display options. Combine that with motion-sensing technology already prevalent on the Nintendo Wii and it seems more and more clear to me that within 20 years people are going to be spending a lot of time not just engaged in virtual environments (like they are now in World of Warcraft and other games) but experiencing these environments in a first-person sense that truly makes the user feel like they are there.

When this happens people are going to start disappearing. Whether you're into single-player adventure style games where you explore huge worlds to win quests, or you're into large multi-player shoot-em-up death matches, or you'd rather play sports games where you get to be the star quarterback in what really feels like Texas Stadium, kids will start dropping off the map. Reality will pale in comparison.

I think its likely that companies will even work out price plans that will allow people to remain inside games for long periods and still pay without necessarily having much of an income. I don't know HOW they'll do that but I think they WILL do it. This way when people are reluctant to emerge and go to their job, they'll be able to stay in the game. Maybe indefinitely. If automation hasn't reached the point where robots can take over for that loss of workers, I don't need to tell you what it will do to the economy (if it has, well, maybe we'd be better off inside the game anyway).

But assuming the machines can't do everything for us at that point (Let's call it the social science version of accounting's Going Concern Principle), education has got to keep up so we can handle that kind of competition. Right now we've got House Bill 4294, which will allow districts to purchase digital textbooks. I was excited about that in Austin but the more I think about it the more I cringe. I know when the list of approved purchases comes out in a year it will mostly involve computerized copies of textbooks by the big publishers. It will be taking the same stuff we've always taught, in the same way we've always taught it, and putting it on a computer screen. That's not going to do anything for today's learners (certainly not tomorrow's).

We've also got major software developers saying "There's no market for educational software." That's what I heard from a friend of Craig Hammonds' who worked for Microsoft two years ago when I asked him if they had anything in the works. No wonder, when schools can't buy non-textbook stuff. So Microsoft will keep making more Halo games instead of using some of that development muscle to revolutionize educational software. (I pray that what he told me was old information but I frankly don't hold out much hope.)

What's all this go to do with King Arthur?

Good question

Our current plans to adopt technology into education do not really seek to change the old ways we've done things, but simply to digitize them. We've got Merlin the wizard at the castle but we're asking him to make our kids read a book about fractions or Ancient Rome when we could ask him to take them there, to really help them experience these things.

As virtual reality worlds become, well, a reality, I see a strong potential to create character-developing, thinking-skill-developing learning experiences not unlike those Merlin offered to Arthur. Imagine what a kid could learn by actually spending some time with animals, or people from Kenya, or maybe hanging out with guys like that fat guy in the chair above to help them realize the value of things like knowledge, nature, and real human interaction.

As the 21st century moves on, we as leaders will not only have to fight for what is best for kids, but we will have to recognize that what's best for kids is changing as well. For now we can say that teaching them to be thinkers, how to read, how to interact with others, and how to problem solve are major goals for the education system. But in the future a major goal will also be simply convincing them that the real world is better than the fake world brought to them by technology.

Paradoxically, I submit that in the short term this involves embracing technology to the extent that we encourage the teaching philosophies espoused by educational software companies (and the bodies that they cater to like school districts and the government) to become more constructivist. Most of us would agree that detailed, project-based, constructivists approaches are ideal, but they are rarely used because of the challenges they present in terms of management. Software carries the potential to promote and manage this kind of learning much more easily.

We need to get started with this kind of thing now so that when the virtual worlds that are solely entertainment-based arrive, we have an answer that has a chance of engaging students while also helping them to see that at the end of class, it's best to take the 3D visor off and walk outside.

No one likes a know-it-all

...BUT I got curious about how to pronounce "Likert". Everyone told Rose it was "Like-urt". Moments like that always spur me to search the Internet.

Notable links I found:

What is the Likert Scale and how do you pronounce Likert?

Wikipedia: Likert Scale

It appears that the correct pronunciation is the seldom-used "Lick-urt".

I tried to check sources but they were not online. That said, I found NO sites claiming that "Like-urt" was correct. In the world of web searches I call that a significant finding.

For my part I hear "Like-urt" from everyone and I think I'll continue to say it that way myself part out of habit and part to avoid a constant "No, I looked it up, it's 'Lick-urt' " explanation.

I hate know-it-alls

Oh, and by the way....

The future is now.

Eerily following on the heels of the comments I made on Friday regarding the future ability of machines to emulate human emotions, here's a video I found at TED.com:

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_hanson_robots_that_relate_to_you.html

It's quick and doesn't delve into much detail, but you can see what's coming. He even states that empathy is the goal.

Imperatives

I was thinking back to our group's PD last class and feeling pretty good about it. That said, in the final section in which we discussed leadership imperatives that A Whole New Mind clue us into, our suggestions mostly had to do with relating to people in our organization. The real challenge for us (and in my mind the thing that will actually help the 6 senses to "solve" the problem of the the Three A's) is how we foster these aptitudes in our students.

I'm going to tackle this from the primary education perspective since that's my forte. P-5 students are dripping with desire to play. We see it when they run at recess, play odds-and-evens in the hallway in line, and run home to their video games after school. Likewise, design is with them quite a bit at first (though it tapers off by grade 5). I'll admit, I don't know if any of them are much concerned with meaning (perhaps a blessing of youth is that the young think they'll live forever and so meaning is less relevant). Story is huge with all of them. Even in my darkest days as a failing language arts teacher I could always count on our read-aloud time to be engaging and successful. Empathy would help a lot, and you can really tell the kids who have it and who don't. I think symphony is one of the most important things to being successful these days and we need to start early with kids (I hear way too

often when we add up measurements in my science lab "But this is science, not math!?).

One possible answer I've seen being researched while searching for articles (and I had read about it excitedly before while at Baylor) is the MUVE (Multi-User Virtual Environment). We saw an example in Austin with Second Life. While many researchers are working to create learning spaces in Second Life, some organizations are creating unique MUVEs of their own. The most interesting one I've discovered is called Quest Atlantis:

It has a very Second Life feel obviously, but it seeks to combine learning

with Play, Story, and Symphony by actually situating participating students in a narrative regarding repairing the lost knowledge of the City of Atlantis. It really unfolds a lot like a video game. When you first get there certain characters guide you to talk to other characters to help you understand the fundamentals of the world and how to interact with it. As you go you get little clues about a much larger problem (Atlantis is in big trouble because of arrogant leadership and only intelligent young people searching for knowledge can help...there's some empathy) but of course you have to complete small tasks along the way before the whole story really unfolds. This is classic video game stuff where the world guides you through scaffolded quests and the whole time a larger picture of the eventual goal starts to unravel through small hints and discoveries.

They're still working to perfect the curriculum situated behind the world and its narrative but its an interesting way to connect to kids who are comfortable moving around in a digital landscape and interacting with both real and computer characters to learn more and solve problems.

Really interesting stuff BUT a major drawback as I see it is

the fact that the content is largely static, being created by an understaffed group at a university in Indiana. It will have a hard time competing with the huge staff at Blizzard keeping World of Warcraft running. Competition aside though, while it acquaints students with aptitudes like Story and Design, in the end they are consumers, not producers and users of these senses.

I think a better answer (and we're still a ways off from this in regards to the necessary programs and infrastructure to carry it out) is to let the students build the game world themselves. It's Quest Atlantis meets Web 2.0. By teaching them the fundamentals of programming and design, allowing them to work collaboratively in person and over the net, and building a tech support backbone that can help fill in the gaps when their technical knowledge is less than their designs, we can

start letting the kids build the MUVE.

This would allow them to take ownership of their creations and their learning, engage in diverse communication and problem-solving challenges, and foster their understanding of not just standard math/science/LA/SS curriculum but also of the technical and design aspects that go into building such projects.

Sounds pretty pie-in-the-sky but it could happen.

People at MIT have already built a simplified programming suite called Scratch that really helps students visualize and control the process behind generating computer programs. I've worked with it on my own a bit and it's really an amazing tool. I think if I had some time I could teach a class to use it effectively.

As educational leaders a major imperative is for us to support new methodologies and pedagogies for learning that transcend the traditional factory model. High-stakes testing still looms over us as a detractor but remember the lessons of Hooray For Difendoofer Day! If it's done right, non-traditional teaching practices can still prepare students for tests...but also much more. It just takes brave leaders to free the students and teachers underneath them to try new approaches and work autonomously. Just like Pink said in the video we saw, it would likely produce better results and happier people anyway.

Low inter-rater reliability

Incidentally, I've been noticing that in terms of baby clothes sizes, one company's "12 months" is smaller than another company's 3-6 month, while some 3-6 month clothes fit Pierson fine and other 6-9 month clothes are too small.

There appears to be low inter-rater reliability among different clothing makers when it comes to baby sizes.

Citizenship Education

I was pondering the idea that notions of citizenship are changing. It's a tough one in my mind. On the one hand you see a lot of people driving around Killeen with little flags hanging from their cars from countries like Cuba, Venezuela, or Argentina. I'd be willing to wager that for the most part this isn't meant to flaunt their divergent origins or show lack of appreciation for the opportunities the USA has provided. I imagine they do it more as a result of usually being labeled "hispanic" or "Mexican" and wishing to show some pride for their home countries.

I guess that's neither here nor there. It's certain that there is a lot more diversity in the population of western countries today than there was fifty years ago. But has this led to a significant change in citizenship or citizenship education? I'm not sure. I found a cool website ( http://www.ecs.org/html/educationIssues/CitizenshipEducation/CitEdDB_intro.asp ) that compares the citizenship education requirements in P-12 for all the states and checked to see what was being required and what kind of changes were being made). After looking at it I found that there wasn't much that you wouldn't have expect to find. Most recent legislation in the 50 states involves more "rigorous" rules for testing the existing standards like knowledge of the branches of government and the Gettysburg address. Some states are still passing laws requiring the US flag to be displayed in all classrooms (no problem with that, just seems a little behind the curve). Oklahoma passed a law protecting the right to display "In God We Trust" in public school.

There are a few interesting examples of trying new things. Vermont and Virginia are establishing forums to determine best practices for civic education. Virginia also has some rhetoric in a new law requiring more teaching about the impact of minority persons. South Carolina is trying to make it legal for a 16-17 year old student to run a polling station as long as an adult is around. That's pretty novel. Hawaii is doing some interesting things to promote civic responsibility. According to the site Texas isn't working on any changes to its citizenship curriculum right now.

However, a little further digging shows that a six member panel is currently reviewing Texas' social studies curriculum and it's drawing fire for considering downplaying the importance of minority figures like Thurgood Marshall and Cezar Chavez (http://kut.org/items/show/18200). That's getting a bit far from the general topic of citizenship education (and one reason for downplaying them may well be to try to allot more time for citizenship education in the curriculum), but it almost feels like a slight backlash against diversity in education.

The curriculum changes also seem to be against anti-american rhetoric such as imperialism being taught in out social studies texts. This, combined with the American flag laws kind of makes me think that even though notions of citizenship may be changing in some small ways, citizenship education remains a bit less about diversity and more about nationalism. I'm not saying that's wrong, a country has a right to promote itself in schools as long as it's footing the bill, but on paper at least, I'd argue that citizenship education is not changing much.

Makes you say "huh"

I just noticed about half of us made our blogs at wordpress and the other half mad them at blogspot. Huh.

Shoes for Industry

I’ve read many acknowledgements from our group that there’s a major need to incorporate technology into our teaching and cater more to the needs of modern day learners. I think we would all agree that this is important and that there are major institutional hurdles such as standardized testing and restrictive funding which are standing in the way.

One of the factors that is perhaps most influential in preventing better use of technology in teaching is the fact that no one really knows how to do it properly. We’ve seen plenty of interesting examples such as the MCC podcast lessons. A common one in my area is using a PowerPoint to teach (once in a while some brave teachers will have their own students create a PowerPoint showing what they’ve learned or researched). Internet research is obviously faster than going to the library. You see lots of kids playing some sort of Sponge Bob spelling game on their portable LeapFrog. Attempts at using technology to teach are out these but at the end of the day the research to support any of its validity is lacking.

I read an article when I was taking computer courses at Tarleton that came out in 2008 in which a fellow named Roderick Sims pointed out that teaching has a certain pedagogy which doesn’t translate to these new technologies so well. “Theories of behaviorism, cognitivism, and contructivism…fall short when learning moves into informal, networked, technology-enabled arenas.” (The article was in Distance Education, it was called “Rethinking (e)learning: a manifesto for connected generations”).

We have all of these models for teaching that were tried and tested back in the 70s once the flaws of the factory model of education were being realized. We teach them in our education classes. They work really well if they’re used properly. But when you begin to think about a kid who can use Google at any hour of the day or night to try to learn something and that many students would love to learn collaboratively with others via blogs or “tweets”, they begin to be inadequate. They are NOT useless or failed. But they’re perhaps the Left Brain of teaching. They’re important but no longer adequate by themselves. We can’t throw them away but maybe the Right Brain side that needs to come in for balance will involve taking all new looks at teaching.

I met a man in Cincinnati at a Primary Years Programme conference (J.T. was my roommate) who had put together his own charter school. Students there spent very little time with teachers. Their teachers assigned daily tasks, scheduled brief mini-lessons, floated around and helped but they didn’t hold classes or hand out tests. Learning was collaborative and self-directed. The teacher/student relationship was much more equal. The kids worked alone, with one another, and with their teachers to achieve the tasks that they had been assigned and the ones they had created for themselves. I asked him about the students’ levels and he said a lot of them were labeled Special Ed. He also said that the only test prep they did for the standardized tests in New York was a few brief lessons explaining the format of questions. Apparently they did quite well.

Removing some institutional barriers like huge schools with large numbers of students, restrictive funding, and standards that may not even be all that appropriate in the Conceptual Age would help to open the door for more schools following that Montessori-esque model.

I’m jumping around here a bit. I guess my point is that a lot of experimentation needs to be done before we can really say that we’re incorporating technology in a meaningful way. There are lots of ideas from simulations to games to podcasting and texting but there needs to be some concerted, systemic efforts to try lots of different approaches and to measure the results in both qualitative and quantitative ways.  

In the end, I anticipate that the answers we find are likely to follow Sims’ manifesto in which students and teachers have a much more equal relationship. Students learn from teachers but teachers will learn from students as well as they strive to offer learning experiences that are relevant in a changing world. Curriculum and scope and sequence may go out the window as student needs change yearly. Collaboration between learners worldwide will foster shared experiences and understanding and more diverse citizens. I think the PYP school described above is being brave enough to create a learning environment unlike most and is moving towards shared learning and collaboration and it’s this kind of situation that will open the door to discovering the best uses of technology and adjusting our pedagogy to match.