Learning2oh

While preparing for a recent ITECC class I was looking for a recent article on TPACK and not only found an article but a web site. Now usually I would post link to both in the Moodle lesson and move on, but I think the New Literacies bug has been boring into my brain.

The article is from the Teachers College Record, a professional peer reviewed journal. This is a 31 page article of serious research that has 6 pages of  references. The article will be read by other educational researchers and graduated students who will use it as a reference in their work, as it should.

The web site is tpck.org and is run by one of the authors, Matthew Koehler, of the article in Teachers College Record. It has several sub-pages and links to resources and developing TPACK. Koehler asks for feed back and is looking for others to carry on more research.

The New Literacies bug bite me when I realized that this is a paradigm shift in publishing research. The articles in peer reviewed journals are and will be valuable for years to come. Researchers in any field need to be judged fairly by their peers and their work open to public view.

But, the web site offers another venue for researchers to publish their work. True, anyone can setup a website and call themselves an expert. Yet the very act of being so public invites scrutiny from every other expert. Unlike the journal article, the web site is not static and invites dialog that can praise or criticize publicly.

I know I plan to add my two cents to the web site and I could never do this with the journal article. This is where the New Literacies comes in, because we need to see that with this openness comes responsibility to make sure we know who the “expert” is publishing a web site. We also need to become directly involved in helping the researchers as they continue work on important questions. I like the idea of a researcher opening up a web site and asking for input, it means that we are all more directly involved in finding answers.

A colleague, who is Chinese, commented that learning has to be painful to be considered successful got me thinking about this view of learning. I then found this Dean Shareski’s blog post What does joy have to do with learning and it has me thinking about my own learning. As an adult I get to choose what, when and where I want to learn. Luckily my paying job helps support my learning. As adults most of us don’t spend much time learning skills we don’t enjoy, except when working at jobs they don’t enjoy to make enough money to engage in activities they do. Some jobs require us to learn a procedure or skill we don’t see the purpose of or is difficult to learn and we will give it a half hearted effort to keep the job. As a teacher I was tasked to teach a curriculum I did not always agree with, but I did my best to increase student knowledge and skill. I now wonder if adding a little joy to teaching can change the out come. I have to disagree with my Chinese colleague learning should never be painful, it should be joyful.

The School of Medicine at the University of Virginia has decided that the medical education of 1910 is not  preparing doctors for 2011. The standard medical school is a four year curriculum; two years of basic science and two years of clinical practice. In 1910 that made sense because medical knowledge changed slowly. What you learned about heart disease in 1910 was the same as 1920. Today medical knowledge is changing rapidly. Half of what a medical students learns will be obsolete in 5 years. So even the textbooks can not keep up with medical or science knowledge.

Karl Fisch’s blog post about the Learning Studio approach that the U of V Medical School has adopted moves medical education into the 21st century. In the real world doctors work in teams because there is just too much for one doctor to know. So in med school they learn to work in teams to solve clinical problems and do not have to wait until they are in a practice. With instant access to medical knowledge data bases it is more important that doctors know how to ask the right questions then have memorized how the cell divides (which the doctor learned in 8th grade).

As Karl Fisch says:

Teaching like it’s 1910 doesn’t make much sense (teacher-centered, lecture-oriented, fact-recall, paper-based, standardized instruction.) Ahh, so glad all the current education reform in K-12 matches up with this vision. They have to be college-ready, ya know.

If medical school is the gold standard of education and they are realizing that teacher-centered, fact-based education will not prepare doctors, then k-12 education should be following medical schools example and training teachers to be facilitators of learning and classrooms should be studios of learning.

As I was reading Karl’s blog post and writing this post I was thinking about when I worked at the University of New Mexico Medical School in 1986. I worked in the department of Bio-Medical Communication. We developed teaching materials such as graphics, photographs and videos to be used in the classrooms. One of my jobs was to video tape surgeries so that students could watch them later. Even in 1986 the medical schools were looking for more authentic ways to train doctors. UNM Medical School started training 1st year med students in clinical setting. We trained “patients” in a variety of symptoms and the med students were trained in medical history skills. Bedside manner was also a key skill that was taught. So the ideas that medical training has to be upgraded has been around for at least 20 years and yet many medical schools are still locked in the 1910 model. If medical school are slow to change their mode of education, k-12 is slower. You would think that local schools would be more nimble then large medical school and be able to move from 1910 to the 2000 model quickly, but that does not seem to be the case.

How do I use a blog in my classroom is a question that always comes up when introducing blogging to teachers. So here are 37 Interesting Ideas for Classroom Blogs from Tom Barrett. Tom has dozens of other “How to use …” tips on his blog so take a look.

I finally received my Archos 70 Internet Table 2 weeks ago. I have been following the tablet roll outs for the last 6 months and was ready to buy a Samsung Galaxy at Christmas. The Galaxy price tag of $600 was more then I wanted to pay so I kept looking. Archos is a French company that has been making portable media players for several years, so when I saw they were getting into the tablet market I waited for the release of their 7″ tablet. I purchased the Archos 70 at Amazon for $275. It is currently running Android 2.2 and I will upgrade to 2.3 soon. They make a whole range of Internet tables from 4″ to 10″.

So far it has been what I expected it to be, a mini-computer. Archos has their own app store that has plenty of useful apps, but I had to find a hack to install the Android app store. I installed a 16GB mini SD card and the device will take up to a 32GB so there is plenty of storage space. The built in camera is front facing so is not practical for taking pictures or videos. I tried to use it on a QR is it was very awkward. The virtual keyboard is easy to type and I use it a meetings to take notes. I installed SwipIt software to speedup the typing process and am still learning to use it. MBot allows me to login to Moodle and see that as a great app for students. It does not have a cell phone chip, but will tether to a cell phone. I have not tried to use Skype on the device, but that would allow it to work as a phone. I just thought that Google voice may also work.

The 7″ format for $300 could make it the perfect pocket computer for schools. Add a Bluetooth keyboard and students could write their term papers.

As I am developing the curriculum for the ITECC course the term Literacy keeps coming up. So I knew I had to investigate it and think deeper about the word in the context it was being used. I first encountered the term literacy use in the context of digital technology at the New Literacies Institute I helped organize in June of 2010. I was so busy with the planing and running of the week long event that I never had a chance to spend time thinking about what Don Leu and his group really meant by New Literacies. I understood it to mean that digital technologies changed the way people learned, worked and played, like electricity has changed the way people live, and that the same education practices will not do any more.

When I reread the Expanding the New Literacies Conversation article for the third time the light bulb went on and I saw why “… a more productive approach is to view the Internet as a literacy issue, not a technology issue …”. The article goes on to say that by, “Framing the Internet as a literacy issue, instead of a technology issue…”, it is likely to lead to:

1. Technology standards becoming integrated within subject area standards
2. Instruction in Internet use is integrated into each subject area
3. Every classroom teacher is responsible for teaching online information and communication use
4. Online information and communication skills are included in subject area assessments

The article uses literacies in the context of the Internet, I would like to expand the context to include all digital technologies. In my experience many “digital natives” have poor file management skills and little skill in using tools like spreadsheets or formatting documents. These skills are basic literacy skills like keeping a notebook of assignments.

I was also interested in how the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) used the term literacy in their technology standards document. So, I added the following to the ITECC course.

The goal of the Massachusetts Technology Literacy Standards and Expectations “is to help students develop technology skills to learn the content of the curriculum, as well as to be able to succeed and thrive in their adult lives.”

The use of the term Literacy in the title is interesting. One meaning is: a persons knowledge of a particular subject or field. DESE is saying that here are the standards by which we will measure technology integration in the curriculum. I believe that DESE’s use of Literacy is different than the term as it is used in Expanding the New Literacies Conversation. “We believe that a more productive theoretical approach is to view the Internet as a literacy issue, not a technology issue”

Paper, pens, blackboards, and chalk are all technologies, yet there is not a several page long document setting standards and giving example of how to use them in your curriculum. They are just the tools we use to access the learning process. That is what we need to work towards, when there is no separate document that has standard for using digital tools, they just become the paper and pens we use to access the learning process.

Until then we need to be familiar with the Technology Standards, so if you don’t have a copy handy the link above will take you to them. The document is useful as a guide through the process of developing your teaching unit.