The Last Shrimp

During Saturday’s reception for graduates and their families, we had our usual party repast of cut-up fruit, cheese, mini pizza appetizers, and shrimp.

We’ve been serving a shrimp course at end of year functions since I came here in 1996. It’s a standard part of our fancy repertoire for parent events and it’s always a huge hit.

Not so much this time. As we gathered for hors d’ouvres for the class of 2010, there was a rather mournful attitude. “shrimp,” said one. “these might be the last shrimp we ever eat.” Someone else nodded, “most of the gulf is closed to fishing now. We’ll be stuck eating Maine shrimp.”. Someone else said, “even if we do get shrimp, it may be bad to eat them with all the contaminants in the waters. Give you cancer or something.”

On and on it went. Each new person to the table added to the litany of ills for the shrimp, speaking their eulogy.

Now. Maybe Gulf shrimp are done. Maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re like the ex-parrot of Monty Python fame, and maybe they’re not. What’s really at issue, though, for the guys and gals at the table is that they really like eating shrimp.

For a bunch of us New Englanders to eat cooked and iced Gulf shrimp on a hot summer evening, and to share this feast with Korean, Chinese, and Japanese parents, though… well. It requires mire than your average miracle. It requires energy, and lots of it. Energy to move the fishing boats, and freeze the shrimp, and transport them, and to move the people, and cook the shrimp and then cool them for the people to eat, and to run the lights and manage the performance that all these people have come to see… so there can be a reception at which they will eat Gulf shrimp.

All of which leaves us in a touchy situation. The very environmental disaster which causes us to label these shrimp as “the last” is itself caused by our very real desire to eat shrimp from the Gulf in early June.

Which means that the Gulf Oil Spill is not a problem. It is instead a predicament.

Problems have solutions. If I assign a math problem, it means my students are expected to find a solution. Solutions take many forms, but they all end in the apparent dissolution of the problem they were intended.

Predicaments, on the other hand, have no solutions. Some, like the ancient Greek effort to square the circle, are

Wired goes Digital — Rich textbooks?

Update: Ask and you receive.  Sorta.

I think about textbooks that look like this.  The ability to see the whole textbook, all pages at once.  The ability to zoom in on videos, that walk you around Delphi or Persepolis or Ur.  The ability to look at three-dimensional models of the Parthenon or zoom through the forum of Rome.  The ability to link to Wikipedia articles, or definitions of unfamiliar words, or to every word.  The ability to link to definitions in multiple languages, not just a Spanish glossary that adds forty pages and extra weight.  The ability to hear an audio recording of a section of the Iliad in ancient Greek, while subtitles scroll it to you in six translations (Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, French, Sanskrit — to hear related Indo-European languages).  To hear an audio recording of Euclid’s proof of the Pythagorean theorem, while a vector drawing lays out the lines and creates the proof in visual data, and an algebraic formula appears above it.  A textbook that allows you to see all the other notes and highlighting left in the book by other students in your class — or in the school district, or in your state, or from your continent, or from the world.

A textbook in which information is updated, but updated with a logged history like a wiki.  A textbook in which the editorial changes are transparent, year after year.  A textbook that the students help write, like a wiki.  A textbook in which an increasing number of images are CreativeCommons licensed, and every photograph of every temple, every fortress, every painting, every portrait, every object, links to its Museum, catalog number, and possibly even website.

Oh, we’re so far from that. At first, they’ll just scan the textbook into pixels, and we’ll view the pages on the iPad or whatever device comes along just like it were a book on the desk.

The Bus

About two weeks ago I was at the bus station in Springfield, MA, waiting for a friend to arrive on the bus. While I’m waiting, though, I see a bus for the PVTA pull out, headed for Holyoke with stops along the way. The PVTA is the regional bus system, linking and serving towns in central-west Massachusetts.

Before the bus even clears the station parking lot, two teens come out of the station to the berth the bus just left. They’re both apparently just out of school. Both have bookbags, and big bulky coats, and both are suddenly aware that their bus is leaving.

The boy looks at the bus. I guess they have a policy not to let more passengers on after they pull the bus away from the terminal. But the bus is still in the parking lot. He shoulders his bookbag, and takes off at a run, crossing the street in a moment. He’s racing the bus to the next stop.

The girl stands there. She gestures a couple of times at the bus. I see her turn to her colleague – boyfriend? – who hasn’t been standing there for several moments. She reacts with surprise, and turns back to the bus. She gestures a few times, helplessly, and then turns and goes back into the station.

Now, before you say I should have helped or anything, keep in mind that I am a big white guy hanging around in a rundown neighborhood near the bus station. I’m also a good 300′ away, I have Clio my black dog with me, and I’m waiting for someone whose bus is supposed to be pulling in now. If I go to this girl’s rescue my motives can be potentially misconstrued in a moment as suspect (and even so, I still feel guilty for not offering help).

But what really gets me is the two attitudes on display. They struck me then, and they strike me now, as relevant to the teaching profession. A good many of our colleagues are adopting the girl’s point of view. They’re looking at the tech bus pulling out, bemoaning their lack of savvy, and going back into the waiting area for the next opportunity to come along.

The boy has decided to hoof it. The typical starts and stalls of a bus in traffic – and of tech in schools – give him a 50%-50% chance of making it to the next stop and being able to get on board. Maybe he’ll make it, maybe not. He’ll have some stories to tell whether he succeeds or fails, and he’ll be faster to jump on the next bus when it comes along. And even if he does make it on the next express line, he’ll be more familiar with the neighborhood as a result of his daring and risk.

Meanwhile in the NOW of two weeks later, I imagine that a gap has already opened between these two friends. He abandoned her at a bus station in a rundown neighborhood – a lonely and potentially dangerous place. The teacher thus abandoned doesn’t know the neighborhood, fears the other denizens of this strange world, and wonders when or if the next bus will come. She’s resentful of her faster, risk-taking colleagues. And she’ll fight to keep any other friends and colleagues from getting on the tech bus without her.

Given how rarely official tech opportunities come along in many schools, she and her friends may be waiting a long, long time.

Meanwhile the boy may still be a long way from home. But he’s a lot closer to where he wants to be. And at the risk of alienating colleagues and friends, he’s better prepared to jump on the next bus to come along.

Old Mess / New Mess

I used to think of the world as divided into digital immigrants and digital natives.  Shelly Blake-Plock, David Warlick, Ira Socol, Gary Stager and others helped me to see that thought as misguided.

There are people who are comfortable with most aspects of new technologies, and others who are comfortable with more aspects, and some who are easy with even fewer aspects.  Yet even the most tech-savvy people I know are occasionally rendered speechlessly uncomfortable with some aspect of the new technology.

Instead, I’ve begun to think of the divide between Old Mess and New Mess.

Old Mess is trying to get chalk dust out of your clothes and mouth from lecturing too much.  New Mess is knee and back pain from squatting next to the desk of a student, reading over a blog entry with them before they publish it live.

Old Mess is grading papers individually and recording results in a neat grid.  New Mess is figuring out how to grade a wiki entry on the emperor Tiberius that sixteen students contributed to writing and editing.

Old Mess is writing lesson plans for the next day or week while trying to figure out if the students are going to do or not do their home work each night.  New Mess is knowing, thanks to wiki “recent changes” logs, that no one did their homework before class. 

Old Mess is giving vocabulary quizzes based on word lists assigned by the state or by the textbook, which may or may not relate to the words the students actually need to learn in order to understand the chapter of a book.  New Mess is discovering that your classes collectively looked up 300 words in a 1300-word text, and made wiki entries on each of them.

Old Mess is dealing with a kid who copied his homework from Wikipedia.  New Mess is figuring out if the Wikipedia entry is good information or bad, and praising or correcting the student as needed.

Old Mess is arguing with parents about “appropriateness” of the portrayal of evolution in the history textbook.  New Mess is arguing with parents about the “appropriateness” of actually reading the more salacious stories about Caligula and Nero.

Old Mess is keeping kids with computers away from porn sites and Facebook, and on-task learning to type.  New Mess is getting kids with computers to do more than visit porn sites, Facebook and learn to type.

Old Mess is trying to divide up research projects in such a way that not too many kids will need the same 2-3 books from the 900s shelves in the library.  New Mess is allowing three students to work on the same subject, provided they share their research from the Internet and make one wiki page together.

Old Mess is finding an extra book, pencil or paper for the underprepared kid to take notes.  New Mess is creating a quiet place in a busy classroom for the underprepared kid to work on his podcast on the Great Fire of Rome.

Old Mess is asking, “any questions” and listening to silence in the room at the end of a lecture.  New Mess is hearing ten questions as you circulate the room.

Old Mess is being the only expert in a room full of beginners not eager to learn.  New Mess is discovering you’re only the most experienced learner, commanding a team full of learners.

Old Mess is being short of funds to buy extra books and supplies.  New Mess is discovering how many USEFUL different tools and resources are free online.

Old Mess is fighting with administrators over textbook choices.  New Mess is administrators asking when you’ll get around to getting the textbooks you don’t plan to use from the book storage room.

Old Mess is fearing parent-teacher conference day because you have to report a string of a student’s failures because he can’t read a textbook.  New Mess is fearing parent-teacher conference day because you have to report that a student’s success is due to a bizarre interest in Nero’s reported perversity.

Old Mess is explaining to a parent that their high-performing but non-English-speaking child can’t write a cogent paragraph yet.  New Mess is explaining that they can’t write a paragraph yet, but they’ve added 40 vocabulary words to the class wiki in two languages.

Old Mess is losing a student paper.  New Mess is knowing how little homework a student has done based on the wiki’s “recent changes” log keyed to username.

Old Mess is discovering how many students make the same grammatical mistakes on their papers.  New Mess is discovering how many students “correct” other people’s wiki sentences to grammatical incorrectness.

Old Mess is file folders filled with reams of student papers. New Mess is a digital portfolio full of dozens of “in process” projects.

Old Mess is too many papers to grade.  New Mess is grading a tangle of wiki pages and links.

Old Mess is bad cursive handwriting.  New Mess is clear Garamond 12-point, revealing the underlying writing flaws.

Old Mess is lots of low-level problems disguising lots of high-level  New Mess is lots of low-level problems revealing high-level problems.

Old Mess is “how should I teach?”.  New Mess is “How do we all learn to do this better?”

Old Mess is tradition.  New Mess is FutureShock.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Have you seen the Wave?

No, I’m not talking about Google Wave.  I hear it’s pretty amazing.  Yeah, whatever. Applications and tools come and go.  No, I’m talking about the bigger wave. The one that’s going to bury your school’s “Acceptable Use Policy” for internet tools.

See, Finland just made broadband access to internet services a legal right. It turns out that Switzerland did it first back in 2007, so there are now two countries that define internet access as a human right.  Mobile access, landline access, whatever.  It’s a right. Meanwhile, AT&T and other American providers want to charge you extra for what other nations (only two right now admittedly) regard as a necessary part of being a citizen and a human being.

Oh.

The second thing is that the tech underlying Internet access just underwent a shift.  In this story from Business Week, the WiFi Alliance industry consortium announced that they’ve figured out a combination of hardware and software that turns any WiFi enabled device into an access point.  And it will be on the market in six months.

Pay attention to the last paragraph:

There’s also growing interest from manufacturers of cheaper cell phones, Giordano says. Today, Wi-Fi can be found mostly on high-end smartphone models. “The new use cases are really going to allow the technology to proliferate among devices it’s not been considered for,” Giordano says. “We are expecting that this will drive a lot of growth for us.” Worldwide, shipments of Wi-Fi-enabled cell phones should rise from 64.9 million units last year to 314 million units in 2013, according to consultant IDC. “This technology is going to be ubiquitous in every notebook and netbook in 12 to 18 months; it’s going to be a very fast ramp,” Martz says. “And I think that’s a pretty conservative [estimate].”

Remember when we had to deal with camera-enabled cellphones in school?  My school’s solution was to demand that we be able to put a sticker over the camera lens.  Our initial position was that we be able to paint over it with black nail polish; parents didn’t want us ruining their kids’ cellphones that way, but they accepted the stickers.

Most of the stickers were gone in 24 hours.

Then we banned cellphones from the school building completely.

But now?  A kid has a cellphone in his backpack in my class.  There’s another cellphone across the hall.  And one in the locker upstairs.  And two more in the science lab down the hall.  And two more in the art room.  And three more in the student lounge.  And mine, in my school bag.

It becomes this big fluffy blanket of WiFi, routing everyone’s signals to the edge of the building, and to the cellular tower on the top of the nearest tall hill.  Or the other cellular tower, in the other direction, on the nearest not-so-tall hill.

In two years, none of your students will be using your school’s very expensive WiFi services that are blocked by expensive filters.  They will be using the grid created by their own cellphones. Sure, it’ll be expensive to keep all those phones charged, and paid for, but then…

Your students already know what the Finns and the Swiss know:

Access to the Internet is a legal right.  And your students will break your school’s acceptable use policies to gain their rights. Better get used to it, and start thinking about how to change your policies to account for the Next Big Wave.

Golden Swamp » This is the week the internet took over

For me, noticing the change was very direct. It was not the first such change I have experienced. In the 1940s and 1950s we waited for LIFE magazine to arrive to see pictures of the important events of the week before. Although we had two good newspapers in El Paso, Texas where I was then growing up, the news was largely local and the images were few and pretty grainy. LIFE’s broad, rich pages were the main medium for us to see our larger world. In the 1960s and 1970s, television brought us Walter Cronkite and the anchors who followed him to show and describe to us what was happening in the world. The role of TV as the go-to place for me when something was happening did not change again until this week.

The turning point for me was when I came across a tweet on #Iranelection that mentioned a woman having been shot in Tehran. I clicked through to YouTube and landed on the video of Neda’s death. I saw it — and watched it in horror — hours before it began to be mentioned in cable or television news, much less printed in a newspaper.

via Golden Swamp » This is the week the internet took over.

Judy Breck, the principal blogger at Golden Swamp, is absolutely right.  The traditional media are not going to come back. They can’t; they don’t move fast enough.  

Well, that’s media, I hear you say. We’re schools.  We don’t work the way media works.  We’re invulnerable.

Oh dear.  Schwartznegger announces he’s going to pull the plug on textbooks in California, and yet nobody thinks schools are going to change? 

Are you a content provider, Mr. and Mrs. Teacher? Or are you an interpreter of the media provided for you in the form of textbooks? Is the information in your brain so valuable that it cannot be circumvented by approaching Wikipedia directly?  What will you do when your eighth grade math student can approach a working, active mathematician with an Erdös number directly?

But wait.  In a constructivist model of teaching, we’re all supposed to be guides-on-the-sides, not sages-on-stages.  We’re supposed to take a back seat and let the students figure out the work, do the problem solving, and find the solutions.

So why do we need teachers at all?  I pose this question to my friends and colleagues, and I get variations on “discipline and punishment.” I’ve heard the following things: Well, if you don’t make ‘em do the work, then what are they (the students) going to learn?  You have to set deadlines for them, or they won’t take the time to learn anything.  You have to set rules, so they know how to behave in school.  It’s about learning responsibility, and showing up with the work you need to do already done.

Begging your pardon, but my friend Johnny understood this instinctively today, though he didn’t say it in relationship to school. At the end of the lunch in which he said, if you don’t make them do the work, how are they going to learn, he also said this: “It’s been a great lunch, but I have to go back to work.  I need to eat this month, and I won’t get paid until I finish this project.”  

Seems to me that Johnny is on to something.  He’s learned to do the work he does on time and well, because he’s got a powerful need to eat sometime this month.

And if Johnny, and the teens, want to learn well in order to go into serious professions like engineering, or science, or medicine, or law… well, those professions have entrance examinations with serious study required.  But it doesn’t take twelve years to turn out someone who knows how to study well.

It takes eight. Maybe. So maybe we should start restructuring our curriculums in the U.S. to eliminate high schools, and revise the labor laws to give our sixteen-year-olds access to apprenticeships and internships and other kinds of opportunities, where they have to learn self-discipline, hard-core learning, and labor-for-food.

The U.S. lost 625,000 jobs last month.  Maybe it’s time to put teenage energy and teenage ingenuity to work… real work.

Rosetta Stone & the Foreign Language challenge

BANGALORE (Reuters) – Rosetta Stone Inc (RST.N) is saying “seichou,” “seungjang” and “Wachstum” — Japanese, Korean and German for growth — as it looks to take its language-learning software beyond U.S. shores.

The newly public company sees the three countries as its most attractive global markets, presenting an opportunity three times the size of the United States, Chief Executive Tom Adams said in an interview with Reuters.

And this is a problem for boarding schools in Connecticut.  Many of our international students come from Korea and Japan, and China is a growing market source for us.  Yet students from these countries come for immersion studies in English.  It takes most of them far less than a year to learn English well enough to speak it.

But they’re not learning how to speak the language in class — they’re learning it through immersion in American culture.  They’re not being taught the language; they’re having to listen to it and learn it that way, the way one learns language as a child.  Grammar? Pfah.  Who needs it if you learn to speak like a native would learn?  And, of course, why come to America if the English instruction is better by computer?

In the long run, Rosetta Stone and its competitors mean a diminishing number of Asian students in American boarding schools, if all they’re coming for is the English instruction.

“If you think about how language learning happens around the world right now, people learn how to pass tests. But they can’t speak. It’s a fundamental problem,” Adams said.

Indeed it is — for schools.  If a computer-driven foreign language program can teach students to speak, read and write in a foreign language, then foreign language instruction in schools is in real trouble.  This is one-fifth of the basic technology one needs to begin replacing school-as-building with school-as-portable-device.. and eliminating most of the teachers that go along with school-as-building.  One core curriculum element down, four to go.

A study by City University of New York professor Roumen Vesselinov found 55 hours of Rosetta Stone was equivalent to a college semester.

And here’s the crux of the matter: fifty-five hours is more than a quarter of the time needed to learn a Western language fluently.  It’s estimated that most Western languages, from Russian to Spanish, only require 200 hours of practice to gain fluency; more reading and writing and speaking make you more fluent, of course, but 200 hours isn’t a lot.

To put it in perspective, if we built into our schools’ schedule an immersion-style program, which involved two hours out of every school day, our students would graduate high school with four additional languages besides English — one for each year of high school.  This is non-trivial, and worthy of notice.

Rosetta, which provides online and CD-ROM-based instruction services in 31 languages to individuals, companies and schools, is targeting the larger pie by chasing the traditional players.

Thirty-one languages.  Languages available include Pashto, Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, Japanese, Italian and more.  Again, non-trivial.  How many American schools offer more than English, Spanish, French and occasionally Chinese?

Rosetta is addressing the need for English language learning in U.S. schools for students whose parents don’t speak English at home.

“We’re very active in schools. We’re in over 10,000 schools. That’s a fast-growing segment.”

via Eyeing growth, Rosetta Stone speaks in foreign tongues | Deals | Reuters .

Again… two hundred hours for fluency in any Western language, including English.  Learn one Romance language like Spanish, though, and the others fall easily to 100 hours of study or less — easily within range of a semester worth of study… imagine applying to college with five languages under your belt, to study international relations!  Admittedly, languages like Japanese and Korean and Spanish require a lot more practice — maybe 300 hours. Still, we’re talking two semesters, not years and years — and instant, immediate opportunities for high school semester abroad programs.

Sugata Mitra’s maxim holds true: Any teacher who can be replaced by a computer, will be.

2¢ Worth » Think 100 Years Ahead

I just learned, from the ThinkQuest website, why we have such a difficult time appropriately funding education.  No surprises here, but it’s a Chinese proverb that I was not aware of.

“If you are thinking a year ahead – plant seeds; If you are thinking 10 years ahead – plant a tree; If you are thinking 100 years ahead – educate the people “

When was the last time anyone you know was thinking a hundred years ahead?  When was the last time you saw somebody do something a hundred years in mind? 

via 2¢ Worth » Think 100 Years Ahead.

Let’s consider it, then, Mr. Warlick.  Let us say that in a century, we want the world to reap the fruits of biotechnology, have a successful and sustainable moon colony, a similar base of operations on Mars, and exploration vessels in the Outer Planets.  We want our atmosphere clean, our oceans rich with aquatic life and less pollution, and a successful globe-spanning culture that provides peace and prosperity for everyone. 

Let us create schools where students learn gardening, biology and molecular biology, humanism, physics, yoga and tai chi, reading and writing (1 skill!) preventative medicine, sex education, astronomy, environmental science, computer programming and calculus, chemistry, and teamwork & conflict-resolution.  

Where’s our first school going to be? Can we open this September?