Copyright, Twitter, and the School Paper

Our school newspaper started out as a rag. The faculty advisor who founded it would happily tell you so. But that same advisor has turned it into a really high-quality middle school paper over the last eight or ten years. A lot of middle schools don’t even have papers; it’s her dedication to the project that makes it possible.

So I was honored when she asked me for an article describing Bill Sullivan’s and my keynote talk at Chase Collegiate School a week ago. She said, “Around here, it’s important news — a teacher delivers the keynote at a major conference?”  So I wrote up a little 600-word article that I thought would fit into the paper’s emerging style; and sent it off to her with a link to the presentation online, and a link to the the conference wiki.

Then she came back to me, to ask about using an image from the slideshow, and I got leery.  I mean, I can always take down a digital slideshow if someone gets all huffy about copyright at me.  I’m just a private person, and I don’t have much to take.   But a school is a school, and this is the school paper we’re talking about. And a school could have a lot to lose in a copyright fight.

But she didn’t want to have just any image. She wanted a very specific one… one that was a key to our presentation, and a key to drawing teachers to the conference. She wanted the one on this page.

So I contacted Dave Gray, the creator of the image.  Dave Gray is the principal of XPLANE.com, and we met first through his Flickr account and then through his .info site, and then through his blog, Communication Nation, and then in person at the Learning and the Brain conference at Avon Old Farms School two Augusts ago, where he introduced me to my friend Josh. Now we all communicate with each other (largely through Dave’s instigation), on Twitter.

Which is how I contacted Dave Gray.  Publicly, on Twitter. I asked if the school paper could use his image and print it in the paper.  I asked again, expressing the urgency of the matter. He asked which one. I explained that it was the one from the wiki of the conference.  He said sure!

So consider… This is the FIRST time that our school paper has had to seek copy right permission from a creator outside our school. And we got it through direct contact with the creator. By Twitter.  In a public forum.

And how did the direct contact with the creator come about? Through me, a teacher, being a photographer interested in sharing my work, and looking at the work of others online; through me being an avid collector of information about visual thinking; and through contacting a web of community connections that stretches from the Arctic to Africa, from Flores Island to San Francisco, from the offices of XPLANE in St. Louis to my own school’s newspaper room.  By way of the internet.

So my school is pushing its school newspaper into the digital age, and providing them with a major new professional-level story, because of my Personal Learning Network (PLN) or whatever the kids are calling it these days.   I just call it “my friends.”  But there’s a parallel warning here, too.  You can shut down kids’ access to the internet by filter and fiat for as long as you like at your school.  But if the kids don’t have to use it in your school, your teachers will never learn to use the internet, either.  Their jobs won’t require it.  And if they don’t have to use it, they won’t.  So your teachers and administrators will never meet people like Dave Gray.  And neither will your students.

And that’s a huge loss for your school, your faculty, and your students.  Get out there and meet the world, people.  It’s time.

We Stand Condemned

Today is the anniversary of Krystallnacht, 71 years ago today.

German Nazis burned synagogues, smashed shops windows and properties belonging to Jews, and systematically an entire minority in their country.

We say “never again.”

But the truth is, we are letting it happen again. Here in the United States. Right now.

We won’t let an entire class of about 10% of the American population serve in the armed forces.  We won’t let them marry legally.  We allow their families to turn against them.  We allow derogatory things to be said about them in schools.

Twenty years ago, we got the freedom our presidents asked for, for East Berlin.

So… If you’re a gay reader of this blog, or even if you’re not a gay reader but you know someone who is, please tell me, the clueless straight guy:  How can I help you win your legitimate civil rights — to marry, to serve in the armed forces, to live in peace and without persecution?  What can I do to help?

Evolution Rap

I won’t be doing evolution until spring term with my revised curriculum.

But I need a placeholder in the meantime for this video:

Figuring how to teach evolution, and to what degree, is a challenge for me every year. Some parent objects to how I teach it; the science is in flux and my book is out of date; I’m constantly refining my thinking about the process and understanding it more clearly; while my students are usually starting at square zero.

But absolutely it should be taught.  I think I’ll use this video later this year, sometime around March.

Cooking for Boys: Finale

Today was the last day of my extracurricular ‘class’, Cooking for Boys. In the past, I’ve talked about hamburgers, ruined cookies and going to the farmers’ market, but they’ve had five training sessions together, and I’ve let go of more and more control in the course of the six weeks that we’ve met every Monday.

At the start, I was constantly asked very basic questions.

• “How much is a cup?”
• “What’s a teaspoon?”
• “How do you measure a pinch of salt?”
• “Where is the baking soda?”
• “Can we watch a movie?”

By the end, I was being asked much more sophisticated questions about cooking:

• “What’s the rising time for this bread dough?”
• “There’s no buttermilk. What can I substitute for buttermilk?”
  • (I didn’t know.  Turns out it’s a tablespoon of vinegar in a cup of milk.)
• “The recipe says 45 minutes cooking time, but it looks done now?”
• “What’s the difference in color between overdone and underdone shrimp?”

At the start of this experiment in cooking, I got requests for simple things, like hot dogs and hamburgers.  Then we graduated to things like mashed potatoes and Haricots verts (pretty sophisticated for 8th graders, you’d have to say).  Last week, we made Real! Genuine! Thin Crust! Pepperoni! Pizza! And that was a real hit, and an eye-opener for everyone:

• “Wait, we made, like — $thirty bucks!? — worth of pizza for like twelve bucks??”

And along the way, everyone learned to appreciate food more.

Today was their final exam.  We had someone making hot dogs with melted cheese out of my grill, and some other kids made the best home-made chocolate cake that has ever been made in my kitchen (it’s also the FIRST chocolate cake in my kitchen, but don’t tell them that). And we had a real-live, genuine fettucini alfredo made on my stove for the first time.  And a young international student made a dish that is his favorite from his mother’s kitchen… a sort of pork fried rice thing that was delicious and incredibly spicy.  I don’t even know what went into it; his mother heard he was in the cooking class and sent him the spice packets from home.

I didn’t measure out a single ingredient.

I did explain a few things in the recipes.  I helped cream some butter when one kid’s arm got tired (no electrical tools in my kitchen — except the Cuisinart, and that’s broken).  I identified the difference between a starting and a rolling boil, and I ran the double-boiler (which is tricky) to melt some chocolate for the cake.

For today, I didn’t even go on a shopping trip.  I just gave the kids some recipes and told them the ingredients were PROBABLY in the kitchen.  And they had to search, and double-check that they were.  Only one kid changed his recipe; the others decided to go without a couple of ingredients, and were sufficiently satisfied with the results that I don’t worry about it.

But the most important part of the day came in the form of an email from my colleague.  She wrote to me to apologize; we share a classroom, and she’d used some of my supplies:

Due to poor planning on my part, I had to borrow a pile of cardstock from you. I will replace it as soon as I can.

Thanks,

I wrote back:

Dear (colleague),

A classroom without supplies or materials is like a kitchen with an
empty pantry and no cookware – Useless.  What’s mine is yours.

Andrew

And it’s true.  Every school in America and the world should have a kitchen where real food is prepared by a trained cook supervising teams of students who work for several weeks together — to learn to cook, to be on a team of cooks, to manage a kitchen, to handle and test ingredients, and serve food to their classmates. They should get school credit for it, and they should be applauded for having the know-how.

And yeah… every classroom in America should have a well-stocked supply closet of construction materials.  We shouldn’t have to apologize for ‘raiding the pantry’.  We should be DEMANDING that our classrooms be stocked with more than just endless reams of useless workbooks.

You want a test? I’ll give you a test — ten kids used a small and unfamiliar kitchen with room for four bodies and attached pantry today to produce a five course meal in an hour and a half. If that’s not a test, I don’t know what is.  And not a single No. 2 pencil in sight.

International Audience

My colleague at Suffield, Bill Sullivan, recommended that I put a ClustrMap on my blog page, so I could see where visitors came from.

It’s pleasing to me to see that I’ve had readers visit from every inhabited continent, as of this past Friday: North America, and the United States in particular, is my biggest source of readers. Even so, it’s nice to think of someone in the Capetown spring enjoying my writing.

Timed Essays

The sandglass runs for 22 minutes.  I’ve timed it three or four occasions to be sure.

In my -2b section, the writers are all over the room. Two have their heads down in despair or thought or sleep.  One is playing with her notebook in frustration.  Three are chewing on their pencils.  One is carefully blackening the margin of the page.

Three kids have written over five pages apiece.

The goal is flow.  Can you sit down, check the assignment, and write for 22 minutes without stopping? Is what you write any good?  Can it be used to assess your writing skill? Would you want to let anyone else read it? How would you know?

It’s incredibly difficult for most students in ninth grade.  In any grade. But if you can’t write well and fast, school becomes increasingly difficult for you as time goes on.  The writing methodology doesn’t matter — pen and paper, paper and pencil, typewriter, word processor, computer, wiki software… if you can’t reach the point of producing flow, if you have think hard about every word… it’s painful to watch kids go through that.

The hourglass seems to help. They can look up and see the falling sand, estimate how much time there is left, and how much has passed.  It’s amazing to me that a simple analog tool like this (analog? Isn’t it proto digital – a sand-mote is either above the neck or below it?) can help so many kids so rapidly.

Art of Memory

I read about this memory technique about eight years ago, and I’ve kept coming back to it.  It’s the Ars Memorativa, or the “Art of Memory” and there are hints and suggestions in ancient literature that Cicero, among others, used it.

In shorthand, the way it works is that the user spends 2-10 minutes a day building up an image in their mind of a specific room, usually a library, with 10-15 places or locations within it, which can be visited in a specific order.  For convenience, they’re usually numbered 1-15.  Then, when they need to memorize something, like the points in an outline or a a series of quotations to use on an essay, there’s a framework in the mind where those quotations can be placed and called up in a specific order.  I use a pretty elaborate library for this exercise, myself, because I speak quite frequently to the whole school, and I like to have an outline in my head of what I’ll be saying, but I don’t want what I say to sound forced or read-from-a-page.

Several students complained after yesterday’s timed essay that they had had difficulty remembering their outlines and quotations from study time on Monday and Tuesday to Wednesday morning. I told them that’s because they don’t train their memory banks to hold information, and we talked about this technique.

The first step in ancient and Renaissance times was to write a description of the library, and then use that as a guide to visualizing it in your brain.  I assigned that last night for homework.

Today, I grabbed one of the kids’ homework assignments at random, and built it using Google SketchUp on the whiteboard with a projector.  The girl whose assignment it was, was thrilled.

The memory palace

I then demonstrated the technique to them; we created a list of several items from the grocery store that I might need to buy, and I spoke them out loud and ’stored’ them in the image on the screen: “The milk goes on the red table, and the eggs go on the blue table.  The toilet paper goes on the yellow table by the bookcases.  The gold bond goes on the left side of the bookshelf. The IcyHot goes on the middle shelf, and on the right side holds the deodorant. The green desk with the computer has a bar of soap.  The computer screen is showing an Axe bodyspray advertisement.  The butter goes on the pink lectern in front of the door.”

At the end of class, before the bell rang, I pointed to the image of Rachel’s memory palace on the screen, and had them test me.  I remembered the items on their list perfectly, and in order.  I was able to repeat it again three periods later after the fire-drill for the other class, and I’m still able to do it now, several hours later, as I type this blog entry.

Not everyone was excited by the technique of the Ars Memorativa, or the Memory Palace.  But it had a double purpose, of course.  The ones that weren’t excited about the Ars Memorativa were excited about learning to use a software tool like Google SketchUp, and everyone got a demo of how to use a powerful study skill, as well as a new software tool.

The trick, of course, is that you have to spend a couple of minutes every day imagining yourself walking through the room, and re-familiarizing yourself with the space, so that you can work with it quickly and successfully.  Once you have the location more or less memorized, you can place individual items in your list in specific locations so you can find them again easily. And your lists can get longer, and longer, and more complex… this room of Rachel’s has space for… oh, probably a list of a few hundred items in it with enough care and practice. And the beautiful thing is, you don’t carry the list with you always; it drops out of the Palace of Memory the moment you don’t ‘need’ it any more, though you can usually call it back any number of months later if it’s important enough.

I do think it’s interesting that a (2500?)500-year-old technique first developed for Renaissance spies and speechifying Roman senators has been so long neglected in schools, but that half-a-dozen kids saw an instant use for it.

Update: I’m reminded that this is not a particularly fastidious explanation of the Ars Memorativa or its origins. Those wanting to read more should consider this article and this one.  No, I’m not a member of AODA, but this is the best online explanation of the art I know.

Timed Essay: Followup

As I’ve noted elsewhere, I try to give my students a timed essay once a week. I constantly say to them, “This isn’t a test. It’s practice.” And it is. If you can’t sit down and write for twenty-five minutes straight without some sort of interruption about a topic you’re studying in a class, school eventually becomes very difficult. Finding ways to help students navigate that barrier becomes very useful.  Unfortunately, there are very few cures for a failure to write well besides practicing writing.

On the other hand, if you can help a kid reach a point of “flow” in their writing, so much the better.  That’s ultimately the goal, isn’t it?

Of course, there has to be follow up.  I don’t grade the essays in any way, but I used take the time to pick one or two bad sentences, and pull them apart.

Then I realized last night, as I was correcting papers, that I could open up the experience for everyone, and make it equal-opportunity.  Here’s one sentence from every kid in the class, followed by a ‘better’ model of writing.

Because I don’t have to write each sentence on the board ahead of analyzing it, I can run through a lot more sentences in a shorter period of time.  These slides were done quick-and-dirty, but I can certainly demonstrate all the usual techniques of proofreading this way, and use presentation software to show how to fix your writing in more effective ways.

As a class, we went through all eleven sentences in a 40-minute period — without photocopies, without a lot of confusion about which sentence we were on.  We were discussing the sentence projected onto the board. We were talking about the sentence visible to everyone, and only that one.

What I should do next time, of course, is what I didn’t do today — which is ask each student to rewrite the sentence in a way that made explicit what they believed the student was trying to say.

Reputation Grade

Shelly Blake-Plock mentioned me in his blog at TeachPaperless earlier this week.

Almost instantly I doubled the number of daily visits my blog received. And unlike the usual event where I get a single boost to my site for a day to read a single post, I suddenly had a hundred visitors a day for three days.

If this were a student blog, how would I grade this?

I mean, it’s not like the student did anything differently.  He’s just writing, after all.  He’s just producing content.  It’s the link, the mention, in someone else’s blog that led to my student getting all the attention.  And schools have literary magazines for that, don’t they?

Don’t they?

Well, the truth is… our literary magazine has languished for a few years. We did not have the budget for it, it was hard to get kids to submit work to it, and it did not get much notice when it came out. For weeks after, the school would be littered with abandoned, torn, half-destroyed copies.  Alas.

But consider what a bunch of regular readers means — as I’ve said before, it makes me more likely to post regularly.  It makes me want to keep and hold the attention of the readers I’ve got, and make them want to pass my words on to others.  I want to write stickily, in the sense that I want what I write to stay with you and make you think about the nature of teaching and of learning.

But more than that… Shelly’s vote of confidence translated into an endorsement of my writing skils, and my thinking skills.  And about fifty people agreed with him, right away.  Three or five or ten years from now, hundreds of people thinking that sort of thing may translate into a book deal for me, or some magazine articles, or the chance to be a principal of a school, or … well, the possibilities are all just possibilities.

For a student, it’s no different.  Assume I was a student:  I wouldn’t have gotten Shelly to read anything by me if I hadn’t met him at NECC, if I didn’t comment on his blog, if I didn’t read his words regularly and let his thinking inflect and inform mine.  Shelly wouldn’t have endorsed me if he didn’t think I had something worth saying.  And I wouldn’t have a worldwide audience without the writing practice, without the reading practice, and without the connectivity practice.

Think about it: if I were grading this student, I’d have to acknowledge that this student did work beyond the core assignment; that he read outside the assigned reading; that he consulted with other experts; and that other experts endorsed his work as of sufficient quality to cite as a source for their own work.

That’s got to be worth more than “just a B+”.  Doesn’t it?

So then the questions become: what does a reputation grade look like? How do you assess it?  How do you note it in a gradebook? How much does it count for? What data is used to determine it?

We tend to think of digital technologies as clean, just all ones and zeroes. Of course, the tech itself IS clean.  But the effect that it has on our profession is such that it’s no wonder so many of our colleagues want to hide from it.   The world of digital learning is messy, and it doesn’t fit into orderly categories.

But none of it WILL fit into orderly categories until we experiment and play with it, and determine what’s useful and empowering data, and what isn’t.  But you can’t know until you try.

Twitter’s #Edchat

I participated in Twitter’s #Edchat tonight.  I’m AndrewBWatt on Twitter; feel free to look me up there.  We were talking about differentiated instruction.

In looking through my tweets and quickly-favorited notes from colleagues all over America and the world, though, I can’t help thinking about how many challenges it sounds like my profession is facing.

Take the term under instruction tonight: Differentiated Instruction. Several dozen (a couple hundred?) teachers didn’t even seem to agree on a definition for the terminology, or how to recognize when it was occurring.

Twenty-first century teaching is messy, apparently.

Other professions, like newspaper journalists and lawyers, usually have a pretty specialized vocabulary for discussing their work and aspects of their activities.  This dialect of the language — this cant — is full of shorthand to describe the process of working in that profession.  Yet when that professionalized and specialized language begins to break down, it’s time to notice that a catabolic process is at work.

Catabolism, from the Greek words for “throwing down”, is usually used to describe the process by which organisms break down complex molecules into smaller and simpler parts, usually accompanied by the release of energy.   It’s also used by historians to describe the process by which societies collapse in stages from the most advanced forms to less complex and more sustainable forms.

We watched this begin with newspapers five or seven years ago. They got thinner, they added color, their price went up.  Newspapers played with formats that they hadn’t changed in decades.  The number of mistakes, errors and retractions went up. A lot of people went into newspapers because it seemed like the field of newspapers was changing, and it was going to be exciting to be in the business.

Yeah. Because the business was changing.  Like, ending-changing.

RSS made it possible for newspaper content to be disaggregated from the plan and format that its editors chose.  Blogs challenged the supremacy of a stable of carefully selected writers.  Flickr and Twitter, while they haven’t replaced the staff photographer and beat reporter, have challenged their dominance.  Challenges to copyright, and the sheer copyability of digital text, have meant that anything, once published online, can be pirated and reworked much more easily than ever before.

Newspapers were no longer in full ownership of their content or the process of creating that content (this is temporarily assuming that they ever had it, which is by no means certain).

Watching my colleagues chat with each other tonight, and joining in, I’m increasingly convinced that schools are going to start to disaggregate in the next twenty years.  Maybe in the next ten. Or the next five.  It may be that someday soon, one of Shelly Blake-Plock’s Latin students would find my explanation of the passive perfect subjunctive more clear than his (I doubt it, but it’s possible).  There’s no reason for that student to confine herself only to Shelly’s explanation, when mine will serve her better.  This is true even though she’s in Baltimore and I’m in Connecticut. Similarly, Shelly may be a more effective explicator of the procedural rules of the ancient Roman Senate than I am (which is not only possible, but even likely).  In which case, my students may prefer to go to his explanation than to mine.

But the beauty/ugliness of this is that we’re engaged in the process of digitally capturing content right now.  Let’s say I put up a little video of the passive perfect subjunctive on YouTube, or Slideshare.net, or any one of a number of tech websites.  It only gets forty or fifty views over the next twenty years, but for the student who needs it, it’s absolutely vital (yeah, right).  Meanwhile, Shelly’s video on Senate procedure gets hundreds of views over the next twenty years.

But each of us only produces the relevant video once.  Now it belongs to the data cloud, and by extension to almost anyone on Earth who needs it — for as long as the data storage format is preserved and maintained in new readers.

And it means that fewer and fewer students will come directly to Shelly for Senate procedural rules.  Because he’s already answered that question.  No one will come to me for my subjunctive explanation, because I’ve already answered that one, too.  And gradually there will be more and more of these explanations available — hyperlinked, searchable, useful, correct, and massively parallel.

This last point is critical.  If I’m in class with a dozen students, I can only explain Senate procedural rules so many ways before I exhaust my imagination.  Only ten students “get it” when I explain it.  But the two who don’t “get it” have Shelly’s explanation, and the explanations of every classicist who ever tries to answer the question digitally.  All those explanations will be linked to each other with a set of keywords, eventually, and the most useful ones will gradually rise closer to the top of the search rankings.

How many of ‘my’ students will need to show up for class at that point?  What will be the point?  My friend Dave Gray believes that “face time” is tremendously valuable — far too valuable to waste on me lecturing you in the hopes that you will get some point of order that can be learned on an ad-hoc basis as needed from the database-that-is-the-Internet. AND that can be learned at any time, on a Just-In-Time, Need-To-Know schedule.

Disaggregation in this context means that “I” will have many, many more students than I have now.  Yet more and more of ‘my’ students will not come to me. They will come to content I’ve created and shared — and if that content exists in a free environment, or in a place and position where someone else draws revenue from it but doesn’t share it with me… then I will be out of work.  Because my school won’t have the revenue stream to pay me, because there won’t be any students arriving for school in the traditional sense.

It’s a catch-22.  If I don’t create digital content for learning, it’s hard to prove my 21st century chops, or empower my students on this new threshold of learning.  If I do create digital content, I’m gradually putting myself out of a job, by digitizing the information I’ve spent decades assimilating into my brain, and making it available to anyone for free-ish.

This is likely to be a non-linear event, or more likely a series of non-linear events, and not particularly predictable…. a Black Swan of sudden change.  Yet there will arrive a day in the not-particularly-distant future when it will become clear that kids can learn more, and more effectively, using online tools, than in the dysfunctional school in their community to which they are assigned.

Indeed, the only people who are even going to be stuck in the schools are those who can’t afford to buy (or be philanthropically granted) into the digital revolution.  Given the growing ubiquity of cellphones, and their increasing power, I’m not confident that this group will be large enough to employ the current numbers of teachers laboring in American schools.  Or wealthy enough, in their physically-disaggregated state, to pay for our services in a local way.

We’re on the cusp of a revolution.  And it may not be exclusive to the field of education — the last major technological shift in learning, from manuscript to printed books, coincided with the Thirty Years’ War.