Tool Time

I keep saying that you can’t think with tools you don’t have. I mean this metaphorically, in part: if no one has taught you how to break your writing into paragraphs, you don’t. That’s a tool. Another kind of tool is more literal: a pair of tin snips. Until you’ve had the pleasure of cutting metal, it’s hard to believe how easy it is, or how hard it is to do well.

It’s hard, as well, to use power tools of a given kind before you’ve used the hand version. At yesterday’s fair I bypassed all kinds of electric sanders and saws in favor of two working hand drills and a pair of tin snips. I almost bought a book press too, to turn into a mini printing press, but it was $100 and I didn’t have that cash with me.

The guy also had inside-calipers and outside-calipers for precise measurement that may have been a century old, but they cost more than I could have afforded. And yet the result of my not buying them is that we won’t be able to think about those measurements in the design lab. At least, not yet. And this is sort of the point: until you can drill holes easily and precisely, you don’t think about holes as contributing to a solution to a problem. Once holes are part of your repertoire of solutions, because you know how to use a drill, you think about them as part of your mental process.

And so I wonder what set of tools to make available to kids in the design lab. Because whatever tools we give them to use become part of their mental repertoire as well as their physical one.

You can’t think with tools you don’t have

Three short stories, and an axe to grind. Bear with me, and I’ll get to the point.

You can’t think with tools you don’t have. Seems simple enough, right?

Story number one. My mother saw the new computer at college that I’d bought through the tech department’s arrangement with Apple Computer, and said, “what do you need one of those for?” I told her, “writing papers, making art, sending email, publishing a newsletter. You have to get one.” she asked me, incredulously, “what would I use it for?” I told her to get one first, and find out what she used it for later. Twenty-five years later, she’s used it to be the president of a board of trustees, to be a graphic designer, a home-business entrepreneur, an accountant, a data-gatherer, a phenomenal correspondent and a journalist.

If she’d waited to get a computer until she knew what she was going to do with it, she’d still be waiting.

Story number two. My friend Josh has built a pair of headband-mounted cat ears on servos, attached to an EKG reader and an Arduino chip. When you wear the ears, and mount the EKG sensor on your forehead with a little grounding clipped to your ear, the ears swivel left and right, up and down, depending on how much attention you’re paying to what’s going on around you. To build them, he needed a soldering iron, a Cupcake MakerBot (3-D printing), various electronics parts, and a community of folks interested in Arduino devices and having them read code from EkG sensors. Ultimately, he even needed the expertise of some serious electronics designers to solve a power problem.

But he couldn’t have done any of it without a set of tools he already knew how to use, and some ambition (in the form of a cosplaying lady friend).

Third story. Around a million years ago, more or less, our hominid ancestors started making tools. They’d been making “tool” for around a million years, but the Acheulian Hand Axe was our go-to device for a million years. The archaeological record strongly suggests we didn’t know how to make anything else. But then, over a few thousand years, we invented a stunning number of tools in very short order — hammers, knives, needles, fishhooks, harpoons, bowls, cups, baskets, fishing line, arrows, bows, swords… The list goes on and on, and really the business of inventing specialty tools hasn’t stopped at any time in the last million years. A million years of tool-making.

I’m simplifying these tales a lot, because I want to grind an axe, and then I want to chop a point onto this spear I’m pointing. Today, an adequate “school kit” should contain more than just pens and pencils. I realize we’re worried about violence in schools, but safety scissors are dumb. Can we please give kids real tools, and let them have at least a pocket knife in their school bag? For a million years, kids as young as two have been given sharp implements and instruction in how to use them effectively. This is the patrimony of the planet, and if a kid doesn’t know how to use a knife safely by the time she learns to read, how is she going to feed herself, hmmm?

End of axe-grinding. Onto the point.

If the Kavad, and my designer friends, have taught me anything, it’s that you can’t learn to think through problems with tools you don’t have or have never learned to use. Walking around my friend Matt’s new house with him, we thought nothing of looking at misplaced doors and locations where there should be windows. He’s a carpenter! Walls in old houses aren’t solid to him. He has the tools and technology to rebuild them. My friend C takes apart commercially-made toy puppets because they don’t serve his hands very well. He rebuilds them to suit his improv games. He knows how to use a sewing machine and a glue gun, and he knows how fabric behaves when it has a head-shaped piece of foam under it. My friend Jared codes websites for a living, because he understands CSS and HTML and Java from the process of goofing around on his computer, and learning these tools. My friend K is a moderately successful chef in large part because he was cutting vegetables and making food from an early age. He knows his way around a kitchen.

These are anecdotes, of course. But it doesn’t change the reality — tools are the heritage and patrimony of the human species, and yet most schools expect and count on students to graduate with only a strong familiarity with six of them: pencil, pen, college-ruled lined paper, textbook, and correcting pen. If they’re really lucky, scissors, glue stick, ruler, rubber band, and (cheap, plastic) geometry compass will appear on the secondary list. oh, and one of the most villainous tools of all, they learn to use quite well: the bubble test.

This is appalling.

One of the things that appears so often on the list of things that American businesses want from employees is creativity. Yet they can’t get creativity from their employees because their employees learned to be creative despite (rather than because of) schools. It’s seen as an “extracurricular” skill at best. Kids learn to analyze literature only, instead of learning to create it. They study history to learn what they’re stuck with, rather than how to change it, or how to make it. And left to themselves, students learn how to use Facebook instead of learning how to make memes that take over Facebook.

So, in the comments here, i’d like you to name five tools that belong in a new, revamped “back to school kit.” They can be digital or analog. They can be online tools or physical objects. At least one of them has to be sharp, and one of them has to be upsetting. You can specify grade level or type of class, but be a little risky, and a little frisky.

Go on, I dare you.

The Kavad solves a divination question

Tonight my friend J came down to see me. She’s been through a lot lately, and we usually catch up with one another once or twice a year. She’s interested in my creative projects, and I in hers, and we usually share for a while before we go back to our lives. Together we wandered down to the river and back, and then had coffee in my favorite coffee place. There, we found one of those posters: “take what you need”, it said, and then it had a bunch of those cut-apart and tear-off tabs along the top and bottom. The choices were things like peace, love, stability, happiness, integrity, honesty, dignity, kindness, mercy, friends, and so on.

J chose magic. And, in the course of our discussion over coffee, an opening to do a divination arose, using geomancy. So I did. I did the shield chart and the house chart, and in general it was a very positive reading. I think she was pretty pleased with the results, and so was I.

But she asked me a question that threw me for a loop. “I like divinations to tell a story,” she said. “When i work with Tarot cards, or oracle cards, i try to tell a story with the meanings of the cards. But i can’t tell… What’s the story here?”"

My initial response to this perfectly straightforward question was, isn’t that your job? I have no idea— it’s your story, and your process. I don’t know what the story is.

I realize this is going to sound crazy.

But the Kavad — which was quite a long ways away, in another building on another block, lying on my desk and totally incomplete, with lots of missing illustrations still — the Kavad answered her question. My brain went to the geomancy panel on the side of the box, processed her question using the existing planning sketches, and got the answers. Not in words. That would be absurd. The Kavad doesn’t have any words of its own. It’s all pictures, after all. That’s all it has to work with.

But that’s just it. Stories are made up of scenes, just as divinations are made up of discrete symbols, semi-randomly arranged. And the Kavad provided me with the images and narrative of the story I needed to tell — and it provided me with the memorable glyph or sigil that I needed to make the story true.

Sounds ridiculous, I know. I mean, I am an eccentric but sane adult. I don’t believe boxes made of foamcore can help me solve problems. Except, of course, that the process of illustrating the Kavad has helped fix these images in mind, and helped me read and randomize the information in the images to draw meaning from them on the fly.

None of this took more than a few seconds. It was nearly instantaneous, in fact. About as fast as a Google search usually takes. I guess that’s sort of the point: the Kavad is becoming a hermetic computer.

Kavad 4.6 Progress

Well, I’ve started the decoration project of the Kavad.  I’m calling it 4.6… where

• 1.0 was the paper model built out of index cards
• 2.0 was the second paper model built out of card stock
• 3.0 was the digital model built in sketch up
• 4.0 was the foamboard construction, in which…
  • 4.5 was the completed model
  • 4.6 is the decoration scheme on the outer frame (started);
  • 4.7 will be the middle layer of decoration (later today?)
  • 4.8 will be the inner layer of decoration (tomorrow?)

So now you’ll be able to follow the blog posts and figure out what’s what, and understand the paper prototyping methodology.  Eventually, version 6.0 will be a wooden version of the model, if I ever get that far… I already think there will need to be a more precise foamboard model, which will be version 5.0 and related numbers.

The first picture in this file is the east front of the Kavad, which will have the Tree of Life on it.  This diagram has been so much a part of my thinking about creativity and about the mindset of the creative person, that I can’t really imagine leaving it off.  I debated whether it belonged inside the box, or outside, but — even though it doesn’t fit with the designs of the rest of the box, I decided that it belonged here, for reasons which I hope will eventually become clear to me, and perhaps to you the reader.  I know that they aren’t clear to me now, and it may change over time.

The second photo in this blog post is the “west front” of the kavad, which as you can see contains twelve niches.  I started out doing these with a ruler, and by the time I finished this side, I resolved to do the rest of them free-hand, because I’ve already decided this is a prototype. Except then I changed my mind again — which I can do, because I’m an artist.  The reason for changing my mind was pretty simple: I need to practice the skills of an artist in order to learn how to do the design work and artistic work necessary to make the object… It’s part of the model of creativity I talked about earlier this week… you have to have skills with the tools in order to do good work.  You need both the practice and the ideas. (And it occurs to me that I should start an artwork-a-day blog in order to practice these skills, too, not just Taiji).

As much as I want to go into the interior of the kavad and start decorating, the discipline of the prototyping number system suggests strongly that I should stay on the outer layer, and put something, anything really, into each of the little boxes or frames I’ve created.  I’m not sure that I have the energy to do all of that today.  But we’ll see, maybe I do.  And along the way I’ll learn lots of stuff about creative work that I don’t yet know, but I’ll ‘get’ a whole lot better as the day wears on.

If it’s a Christian kavad, then I imagine that a lot of the outer layer stuff would be images of saints and martyrs and doctors of the church.  But I noticed when I was free handing some of the icon frames on the outside that I’d done a group of three, and a group of five, and a group of four, and a group of 7, and a group of twelve, and a group of sixteen. That puts me in mind of the Druidic elements (3), the Sorcerous elements (5 – earth air fire water azoth), the traditional elements (earth air fire water – 4), the traditional planets (7) the signs of the zodiac (12), and the signs of geomancy (16).  I guess I’m building a Hermetic/magical kavad this time around.  We’ll see if version 5.0 wavers from that intention.

Lemov And the Administrator

Yesterday I stopped in the hallway to talk to the head of our middle school. He said, “that Doug Lemov book is the best book about assessment and classroom practice I have ever read. It’s so good I can’t wait to pick it up again.”

I told him he’ll really like the new book I’m reading, Driven By Data. It’s about designing and giving assessments that result in good data collection, that allow you to check whether the material you’re teaching is really being learned. But he wasn’t as interested, really. Mostly he wanted to give teachers a set of teaching skills that they could rely on and use constantly.

But Lemov himself says that having a curriculum and the techniques isn’t enough. You need daily plans of what to teach in order to use the techniques, it’s true. But you also need data about what to teach, what to reteach and what to review only lightly.

I’m finding right away that I want that data. Because the techniques are working, but I’m still searching for rigor.

teaching Google

On Monday, I read fellow-blogger Michael Gorman‘s piece about 10 Google tricks and tips for better searches. It was pretty good, so I figured that I would make up a slide show that would review these tips for my students. They likely knew all of them, anyway, I thought. They’re smart kids. Why would they need this? They’ve attended the class on library research and Internet research. This will be a wasted class….

But. I had a new iPad and I wanted to test the workflow of Keynote between Safari and other programs. I wanted to try out some techniques. So I made the slideshow. And then I showed it in class. And then another class. And then a group of students hanging around in the library. And then a group of teachers.

Why did I keep showing it?

Because it was new information to most of them, students and teachers alike. They didn’t know that if you put quotes around a “search phrase” it will search for that specific phrase. Or tat a minus sign (-) will remove implied search terms from the list of searches. Or that you can reduce the numbers of shopping-related terms. Or that you can arrange terms on a timeline. Or as a web. Or that you can search for related: terms or get Google to define: terms for you or find out how many sites link:URL to an address.

Nobody is a digital native. Nobody is born naturally knowing this stuff. If you assume that kids know much more about technology than you do, or you are afraid they will show you up — think again. Chances are, just introducing a group of students to the ways they can expand and deepen their use of Google as a search tool will deeply empower them and their ability to find and relate to information.

So here’s the slideshow. Hope that it’s useful to you and your students. And most of all, remember: They may not know it yet!

Google searches & research

View more presentations from Andrew B. Watt.

iPad, its critics and its potentials

Well.

My mother believes in the transformative power of technology. So accordingly, she bought me an iPad for Christmas, sorta. Belatedly. And in the roundabout ways of boring school mail, this iPad arrived in my hands Sunday evening after study hall.

It’s now Wednesday.

So I didn’t exactly rush to judgment.

And I’m not utterly disappointed.

I’m not wholly thrilled, either.

First of all, it is an exceedingly sexy device. Everywhere I’ve gone in school or elsewhere with it, people have been interested. It is slim, lightweight and distinctive. Yes, I know the WePad from Germany is just as distinctive. But I own this, not that. I’ve used it to play games, read a book, write this blog entry, tabulate data for the track team, manage a grade book, send Twitter messages, and answer mail.

It does not do these things perfectly.

But it does do them well… enough.

It wants a camera — in the old and new sense of both lacking something and desiring it. It wants multitasking, to connect the art and writing tools more clearly. It wants video recording capability. Audio quality is decent enough. The tools for working cloud computing are inadequate —iWork.com is not a suitable substitute for GoogleDocs. The integration between the three iWork tools and iWork.com isn’t seamless; it isn’t even visible, since I’ve been waiting since about 10:00 to have access to a presentation.

But.

I can teach more astronomy with an iPad, SolarWalk, and StarWalk in 15 minutes than in an hour with a whiteboard or IWB. Under a starry sky, no less! A colleague used it to teach a powerful lesson on the periodic table of the elements yesterday evening with an interactive PToE app. And I’ve played chess, checkers and poker tonight, as well as many multiplayer games of HarborMaster, with several groups of kids. And I’ve read two and a half books.

It’s not perfect. But it’s powerful in a way that mere “expanded iPodtouch” doesn’t explain. Colleagues that don’t care about computers were interested. They saw it as a gateway to a computer experience they actually understood, and could afford, rather than a high-end toy they would never completely understand.

I think this may be transformative … at this school. It won’t change this place overnight but I suspect there will be a lot of ipads on this campus by next fall.

Quick Video

I hung a couple of mobiles in my classroom.  I bought them at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City over the Thanksgiving break, and now two of the four are hanging in my classroom.

Some of the photos are too large.  I’ll have to reprint them in a smaller size (after I change the color ink cartridges in my printer, of course), and then put them online.  But I’m eager to see how my students do in searching out the images, researching them, and posting information about them.

Leadership Day: Change the Debate

Scott McLeod put out a call for bloggers to comment on leadership in k-12 schools for change on matters of technology.

Here’s my comment.

Last week, when I came back from NECC, I sent an e-mail to my department chair… who is also my school’s academic dean… to tell him about some of the things that I’d seen and done there, and how to put them to work in our history department. I cc:’ed it to our new head of school.

Among the ideas I advanced were the introduction of wikis and blogging software to our server, and promoting the use of WordPress, OpenOffice, GIMP and other open source software tools.

In the past, the nature of these discussions at my school has run between the positions of “should we have this technology?” or “shouldn’t we have this technology?”  We were focused on other issues, and internet computing

My head sent a response to this e-mail interchange.  He said, “We used blogger.com” at his old school.

Just a very small number of words.

My department head later told me that our new head of school had come into a meeting in order to get the participants to agree to another meeting time.  Everyone whipped out their paper calendars.  The new head said words like, “You can put it there for now, but I want it on the master calendar before the end of the day. Everyone needs to be able to get at it digitally.”

Behold.  Like that, the debate “should we or shouldn’t we?” is over. Now the discussion is over “what tools will we use” as opposed to “are these legitimate tools?”

A few days later, I ran into our new head of school while I picked up my summer mail.  “We have a meeting at 10:00 next week,” he said. “Can we shift it to 11?” He asked me if I needed a reminder, and when I pulled out my iPhone to record the time change, he instantly relaxed.

Maybe he relaxed because a burden was off his mind, but I like to think that he relaxed because I trusted a digital calendar.  He wasn’t going to have to remind himself to remind his secretary to remind me to come to a meeting next Friday at a different time than originally planned. He could move on to the next thing on his to-do list.

Our meeting is to talk technology, that’s just a meeting.  By his initial actions our new head has shown

1. The school is going to use, and trust, its digital calendar;
2. e-mail communication is not just for the peons; it’s for everyone;
3. the answer to tech is not “should we?” but “how and what will we?”

So there’s my Leadership Day advice for all k-12 leaders out there.  Whenever you see an intractable debate that’s paralyzed your school for years, pick the side that wants to move forward, use their tools, and imagine the possibilities.  Then cast a clear deciding vote: don’t just say “yes you can” to a new tool, but  say “yes, I use it,” and demonstrate its usefulness to you and your stakeholders right away.

You have a month or so before school starts to experiment.  Your teachers don’t want to wait until day one of school to get up and running. They want to plan, and they’re waiting for permission.  Don’t just give them permission — lead the way.

Animation & History

This is one of the reasons I think FableVision‘s program Animation-ish is so important.  Yes, you can make silly movies, but you can also make quick digital content that explains important issues.

Everyone thinks of Alexander the Great as a superior general, but in fact he almost lost at the battle of Issus, as the preliminary maneuvers suggest.  A textbook image of this battle, or even one from Wikipedia (on which this animation is based), shows a series of lines that require a careful reading of supplemental texts to understand.  Most kids don’t bother.

But here — with the demo version of the program, as opposed to the full version — I’ve made a short 7-second video that displays the maneuvers of Darius in red, and Alexander in blue.  Alexander’s plan is to hold the Belian Gates (a mountain pass) against Darius.  When it’s clear that he can’t get to the gates in time, he presses on past the Syrian Gates to the Beilan Gates, and waits a while there for Darius to come to him; Alexander clearly plans on trapping Darius between the Syrian Gates and the Beilan Gates.

But Darius doesn’t fall for the bait.  Instead, he waits in Issus for a fleet bringing in fresh troops, and the warships necessary to cut Alexander’s supply lines.  He doesn’t look so great now, does he?  Alexander is forced to backtrack along the coast road to the ford, where he fights the battle.  But he doesn’t get to fight the battle on the ground of his own choosing.  Instead, he fights on the ground that Darius chooses.

So why does Animation-ish win the Gold Medal this year?  Because before Animation-ish came along, I knew how animated movies were made; you made a lot of little drawings, one after the other, and hoped — hoped! — when you put them together that they would tell a coherent story.  Animation-ish does that work for you, and rather easily.  This involved two hours of work in five or six 15-20 minute spurts: it was rather like a kid doing homework, in fact.

“Two hours!” you say. “That’s a lot!”  But with five or six copies of this program, and some other kids working on the script in a word processing document, and some other kids working on the music… well.  Now, with a week of classroom and homework time, you have a rather professional 3-5 minute podcast or movie. It will not only show the maneuvers leading up to the battle, but phases in the battle itself.  Kids do the illustrations, write the script, do the voice-overs, mix the sound, and so on.  And the content can be licensed under CreativeCommons, so every kid in the world can use it to learn.

As the months and years pass, you build a library of these little explanatory videos, that showcase battles, the movements of explorers, the paths of major trade routes, architectural principles, geometric and mathematical ideas, and more.  (TeachPaperless — maybe our classrooms can collaborate on a few of these?) One company, FableVision, earns money to make more varieties of kid-directed creative and story-telling software, the open-content folks get animations of turning points in history, and students get educated in collaboration, creativity, and building stories.

Now for some criticisms: I sped things up a little too fast in this animation.  Animation-ish itself doesn’t give you much idea of how long a frame lasts in time, so I guessed, and it’s VERY short. The whole thing needs to be stretched out quite a lot (In Animation-ish terms this is about 30 frames, and it probably needs to be 75-100).    Also, this was made with Animation-ish’s demo software, so it’s got a weird watermark in the way. And I do wish that Animation-ish’s tools were a little bit more finely grained (though that might improve if I had a sketch tablet instead of my built-in thumbpad).

But online digital content is going to NEED these kinds of explanatory content built into them, or they won’t be any better than the textbooks we already have.  We teachers can let the for-profit textbook companies build them, and charge us all sorts of expenses for the programmers’ and artists’ time, or we can decide that our kids are going to learn how to do this, and create content themselves, and learn to be creative themselves. (And that means, among other things, that open-source textbooks have to give kids the option of building new content for anything, including things that have already been built once, to see if they can do better).

Hmmm.  I know which I’d pick.  And given a choice between spending around $900 for one digital projector, or $900 for fifteen or sixteen copies of this program… well, I think you can see why.

The original map for this video came from Wikipedia.org‘s article on the battle of Issus, where the copyright information asserts that it is in the public domain since it was created by a US federal agency:  the Department of History, at the United States Military Academy at West Point.