Class 9: March 4, 2010

The Maple Leaf Forever!!

Well, since I'm in the city for a two day in-service, I have the luxury of spending some time at "home." So after I got home, and when eating even more, I asked my mom if she knew that song from the Olympics that Michael Bublé sang. She proceeded to tell me it is an old song and then sang it, the Wolfe version. Uh huh. She then told me that my dad knows it too. Ya, mhmm. My mom and dad both said it was in the Manitoba Song Book and that they used to sing it in school (both my parents were teachers who began their careers in one room country schools... yes, back a few years). The point is, they know it. When I told my mom we talked about it in class tonight and said it was considered a second national anthem, she said "that's right." Yep. Where have I been? Argh! I guess I just read too many Richie Rich comics when I was a kid. You know, we actually had Gold & Silver #1 plus a bunch of others that were low numbers. Don't have them anymore though. I guess it's no wonder that I identified with the commodification of education... have always had $$ on the mind!

Ok. My post is up. Check back in a few days.

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Hi, I'm back, evening of Mar 8. Lots can be discussed from this week, enough for about a 10 page essay. But, won't go there; will try to keep it modest, but won't promise full connectivity (more edubabble).

I'll start with Anderson's chapter. I found what he wrote to be full of connections to what I read in Kirschner, and more. Beginning with the term affordance, Anderson gives us some ideas about how the Web can be used to make distance/on-line education almost as good as face-to-face instruction. His play on constructivism is interesting; he says it's about hyperlinking related ideas together. Here I think of the Delicious website: everyone's memory conveniently archived in one spot. I actually read Anderson after Winner and I had to laugh when I read the top of p43, "Communication technologies are used to enhance interaction between all participants in the educational transaction." The emphasis is mine, but the word spin is what is laughable in light of Winner's paper. Winner, as we know, really slammed the commodification/corporatization of education, shall I say, transactional education. Anderson wrote with such nice intentions, but Winner was at war. Actually, I think Winner and Openheimer would get along well.

So, back to hyperlink constructivism: it’s engaging and gets kids asking questions, what I like. Just today I had my middle years students using the Canadian Encyclopedia and doing some searching and reading about the Olympics in Canada. I also had them open a second window tuned to an online dictionary so they could look up words they didn’t know in the Olympics text. It was more like hyper-application-jumping, but it was interactive and effective. This little bit of evidence supports Anderson’s on-line constructivism ideas. There are all kinds of interaction happening when we go online: student-student, student-content, student-teacher, teacher-content. However, it’s not a truly web-based environment because we have the face-to-face component. Also, I’m always there to guide. I give a lot of just-in-time assistance, something Kirschner’s article cited as beneficial.

Anderson again echoes what was said in Kirschner when he quotes Prensky asking “How do students learn what?” Anderson quotes Prensky as saying, four times, that we all learn through imitation and practice. Imitation: examples and explanations; practice: applying what is demonstrated in examples and explanations. On-line teaching-objects for this kind of learning can easily be created and are part of the proposed Semantic Web, which to me really is a rich set of learning-objects designed to afford learning maximization in the on-line environment. Getting back to Kirschner briefly, it is interesting that Anderson points out that the web affords learners the ability to interact with content in multiple formats, but ... that many students choose to have their learning sequenced, directed and evaluated with the assistance of a teacher. Guided instruction, anyone?

I’ll say one more thing about what is written by Anderson. He points to the world-wide collaboration potential that may result by using translation agents. Just imagine being able to discuss ideas with someone in France who is working in French while you work in English. Google translators?

Does the Berners-Lee Semantic Web and the possibilities it represents describe an assault on education the way Winner does? I don’t think so, for as I’ve already said, students want the input of teachers in their learning. There is so much in Winner’s work that reads like Heidegger’s danger, the darkness of education becoming a standing-reserve to the higher power of profit. But, Winner also says that students believe that what is important in their education are clear explanations, fair tests, caring professors and reasonable workloads. Computer integration was at the bottom of the list. That, however, was 1996, not 2010. What might be the outcome of the same survey today?

There is no doubt that the standards Schoffner outlines are related to Winner’s technoglobalism. Actually, those standards in Schoffner read more like job descriptions than educational standards. Some of them are, quite frankly, ugly. You will do this, you must do that. Buzz off! I know those kind of documents need to be deconstructed and then reassembled in a context, and usually I think we can interpret such standards in one page rather that twenty. But it’s not so much the number of standards, it's the demanding techno-language in which they are couched. It’s that corporatism at work, again. If there is one standard that Winner may espouse it’s this, “[develop] a set of well-tuned habits of inquiry and critical thinking that a person [can continue] cultivating throughout a lifetime.”

I could babble more here, but I’ve said enough. There’s more we’ve read and heard that can be connected to these recent articles, ideas from Plato, Heidegger, and Hlynka. The idea of figure/ground Denis discusses in his article Recognition of the Japanese Zero really says a lot about how priorities can be set and what can be made present and spun to ordinary people as important by the powers that be. Consider Heidegger’s presencing again. What is revealed to people as figure or ground is like that exemplar picture of the young and old woman. Which face do you see first? As educators, we need to keep in the figure (foreground) of our teaching those enduring learnings that can ultimately push into the ground (background) the desperate wants of capitalist reformers. Whether we do it on-line or face-to-face is moot.