digital digs

the joys of failure

My 8-year old's "baseball" season began yesterday. Baseball is under scare quotes because this is what happens. It's coach pitch, which is fine since not many kids that age could get the ball over the plate. The batter gets as many pitches as he (yes, boys only) needs to make contact, sometimes as many as two dozen. It's unlikely that the fielders would register an out, but even if the batter is thrown out, he's allowed to stay on base. The inning ends when every player on the side has had an at-bat. When the final batter gets a hit, all the players left on base run home. The kids in the field barely even bother to field the ball. What would be the point?

Now I understand all the things people say about our culture being over-competitive and the ridiculous fights parents get into at their kids' sporting events. On the flipside, one can also read about the questionable value of over-praising our kids. When one kid takes 20 cuts at the ball to hit a dribbler down the third base line and another kid picks it up and either throws it five feet into the ground or in some random direction, why are we applauding their success?

Maybe this seems cruel, but I think that reaction is more telling of us than of our kids. Doesn't this whole thing seem a little out of whack? Presumably the goal here is to insulate our kids from the potential discouragement of failure by creating a situation where failure is impossible. Needless to say, where failure is impossible, success can only be an illusion. Besides, don't we only further stigmatize failure by placing so much emphasis on protecting our children from its clutches? After all the familiar adage about American sports is that the hardest thing to do is hit a baseball. Can't we just let it be difficult?

Of course we do the same thing in the classroom. Pedagogies, particularly for younger kids but even in college, speak of encouragement and opportunities for success. In turn we stigmatize getting things wrong, especially when we prepare students for high-stakes tests. Learning, it would seem, is all about getting the right answers.

I'm not saying we need to swing all the way in the other direction, whatever that would imply. But really we should be encouraging kids (and students) to take risks, to see genuine failure as an acceptable risk in nearly every situation in their daily lives. In my classroom experience, the unwillingness to take risks stands as a significant impediment to learning. And yes, I can create contexts where the consequences of failure are muted, and I often do that b/c I have found that it does convince students to be more experimental. But, again, you can't take a risk if there are no consequences.

And we should be clear that college students are forever taking risks... with sexual relations, drinking, drugs, and any number of other social choices. And they sometimes learn from those risks. The classroom ought to be a mechanism whereby the opportunities for learning from risks and failures (and successes) are enhanced. We ought to be able to say to those kids that striking out is an acceptable risk. It doesn't feel good. It isn't a desirable outcome. But if you can't accept the risk of striking out, you can never get a hit. Maybe 8 year-olds can't understand these risks, but watching my kids I think they are already making more sophisticated calculations about risk in their social interactions with friends. If games were once a form of ritualized warfare, today they are maybe ritualized social exchanges. The applied game theory and (dare I say) rhetorical choices of sports ought to prepare us for future risks.

But only if we are allowed to take them.

pedagogy in space

I'm thinking about the future of humanities classroom design. Wired magazine offers a short piece on the "evolution of office spaces," where it is obvious that they typical classroom follows a Taylorist design model: desks in rows. No one is surprised by this. The familiar tactic of moving desks into a circle or small groups would seem to be reflected by office design innovations of the sixties like the "office landscape" and the "action office" (see the Wired article). Really though, office design doesn't have too much to tell us about university classroom design, simply b/c the office workspace represents a kind of personal space where one sits repeatedly day after day. It is your desk... and certainly classrooms don't work that way.

And yet there are some similarities, and fundamentally the design of the classroom or office is intended to promote certain behaviors and interactions over others.

So we know (or I think we know) that the future of the classroom as lecture space is fairly limited. Secondly, while you can bring students together to have them work independently (e.g. working on individual writing assignments), that doesn't seem to make much sense either. The classroom, like the office, can be an opportunity for surveillance, but in my view that's not a particularly productive use of time/space. It seems to me that if we are going to bring people together in a room we are going to do so in order to accomplish goals not easily achieved without real-time, face-to-face interaction.

So what might those goals (and related activities) be? And more germane to my topic, how would one design a space for them?

• Small group or classwide discussion
• Presentations--while I think lecture as a primary mode is out. Presentations that build in audience participation would be a sensible purpose for gathering in a classroom.
• Project collaboration--an opportunity for students to meet with one another and faculty

If I thought that way, I guess I'd have to say my current classroom is not a bad space: computers along the outer wall, large table in the center, projection system and whiteboard. Students can turn away from the computers for class discussion or to watch a presentation. They can work in groups either at the computers or at the center table. It's a cramped room though if one has the full 20 students in their. It's probably optimal at 15. One could accomplish the same design with larger numbers in a larger room; there would probably just be several tables in the center rather than one large one.

But maybe I'm not thinking big enough here. Tell me again why we are meeting MWF for 50 minutes? It's not so I can stand there and talk. Is it so I can stand over the students and make sure they do their work? Is it because the students lack maturity or self-responsibility? Is this MWF business baby-sitting twenty-somethings? Because really the students don't need to come to class to work on a group project or workshop drafts, do they?

The classroom ends up being a fairly particular space where students gather to interact with faculty. Other traditional classroom activities like listening to lectures or working collaboratively might be better accomplished elsewhere, online or ftf. If I were to worm my way back to the office space metaphor, then the classroom would be like a meeting room and I suppose faculty would be more like project managers.

Now I don't really want to go very far with the office analogy. The pedagogical relationship is quite different from the managerial one. However as we begin to think about hybrid courses, telecommuting and so on, I think we need to recognize how work gets done differently. If the classroom becomes an important place to build relations among students and faculty, then perhaps it ought to be designed with that specifically in mind.

not ready for spime-time pedagogy

I'm teaching Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things right now and thus thinking of his neologism, the spime. Spimes are Sterling's vision for the next generation of technology and draw their name from their unique ability to be precisely tracked in space and time. As Sterling suggests in his book (and here in a 2004 Wired article), we are already beginning to see spimes: objects that are linked to vast databases of information about them. He gives the example of how Amazon treats books. And I was thinking the other day of how I was in the supermarket trying to find an environmentally sound cleaning product. I was staring skeptically at Clorox's new line of green cleaning supplies. So I pulled out my iPhone and did an internet search. I was able to determine that these products were relatively good. So the product is there before me and the information is out there. The spime begins with linking those two. In addition, the spime also tracks its own singular history. That is, this particular bottle and its contents: where did they originate, where have they traveled, and how will they be disposed. Sterling suggests this kind of information will be significant in the necessary green revolution everyone speaks of.

But Sterling makes another interesting observation that appears tangential, but I believe is significant. In the Wired article he notes:

In July, Mexico's attorney general became a smart object. Rafael Macedo de la Concha had an RFID chip implanted in his arm that can track and authenticate him, a bold bid to fight government corruption. Of course, it's his brain that makes him smart. It's the chip that makes him an object: cataloged, searchable, and locatable in space and time.

This reminded me of Baudrillard's arguments about the power of being an object, a somewhat counter-intuitive argument when we generally think of agency as attributable to subjects not objects. If we are indeed moving into a cultural period where we will begin to see intelligence, information, and power as emerging from objects or networks of objects, then I believe this has significance for how we understand our discipline (and I realize that in the scope of this revolution, this is a small corner, but it's my corner).

online learning, writing, and student engagement

A new report was issued this week from the National Survey of Student Engagement. You can read the full report at http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2008_Results/.  Part of the report deals with online learning, where the survey concludes

Controlling for student and institutional characteristics, the percent of first year courses primarily delivered online was positively related to active and collaborative learning. Though this result seems counterintuitive, the online setting may offer more opportunities for collaboration and faculty who teach online courses may be more intentional about fostering active learning experiences, such as asking questions or participating in discussions. For both first-year students and seniors, the percent of courses delivered primarily online was significantly related to level of academic challenge. Online courses seem to stimulate more intellectual challenge and educational gains. This suggests that integrating technology-enhanced courses into the curriculum for all students might have some salutary benefits. On the other hand, it is also possible that faculty who are incorporating new technologies are inherently more inclined to provide engaging experiences for their students, regardless of how content is delivered.

I'm not sure why this is "counterintuitive." Actually, I suppose I do know where that comes from--the idea that students and teachers cannot make real connections without face-to-face contact. I do think it is interesting how the report notes two possible reasons for this outcome:

• Online courses seem to stimulate more intellectual challenge and educational gains

or

• faculty who are incorporating new technologies are inherently more inclined to provide engaging experiences for their students, regardless of how content is delivered.

It's an interesting interpretive problem. I would suggest that both could be true. That is, (some) faculty who are inclined to provide engaging experiences for students turn to online environments because those environments offer affordances that stimulate intellectual challenge and educational gain. Now asking a room of faculty if they don't want to provide engaging experiences for their students is somewhat like asking a room of people to raise their hands if they are racist. Instead, it's one of those things we always suspect of the "other guy." Still, this would seem to indicate that we can still do more--institutionally and as professions--to reach out to faculty about the possibilities of engaging students and the potential of the online option, at least as a component in classes.

In my view, this connects with another important finding in this report on writing.

Is teaching a creative profession?

Certainly according to Richard Florida's definition of the "creative class" it is, and I think most teachers would agree (though they might simultaneously remark on how their creativity is limited by standards, testing, budgetary constraints, bureaucracy, etc.). When we think of great teachers, when we see representations of great teachers in popular media, creativity is a common trait, along with a commitment to education that goes far beyond thinking of it as a "job." And perhaps there is a connection there: when we invest our creativity into an activity, our feelings about it change.

Despite that, we don't think of schools as being creative places overall. People like Sir Ken Robinson identify a crisis in creativity perpetuated by our educational system. Schools are places where creativity goes to die. Students get creativity taught out of them, time and again, in a systematic fashion.

And when we look at teachers overall, do we see creative people in the way we see creativity among writers, musicians, graphic designers, game designers? Or even if we think of creativity in a less "artsy" way as in the creativity of researchers, architects, software designers, engineers: do we think of teachers as a profession that reflects that kind of creativity?

I think most anyone who teaches college can tell you that majors will tend to reflect certain personality types (with exceptions of course). But you can tell the art students from the phys ed students from the engineers from the accountants from the English majors and so on. At Cortland (again.. 9th largest producer of teachers in the nation), there are qualities common to education majors. I would think you could ask any Cortland prof and they could tell you the same thing. Now Cortland is essentially a college of high school B students from non-urban areas of NY state. So they've got a fair amount in common to begin with. But I wouldn't be surprised if the common traits of our education majors were common traits for education majors nationally. What are they?

• They are polite
• Fairly studious
• Well-organized
• Well-intentioned
• Socially conservative (relative to other college students)
• Excellent at following specific directions

My experience is that if you give our education majors a specific assignment, they will do as they have been asked and complete the assignment on time. This is not the way I'd describe our professional writing majors. However, our education majors are not particularly strong creative thinkers. I'll set aside the question of developing their creativity, but it's just not their apparent strength as a cohort. On the flip side, our prof writing students are quite creative, and not just in the "creative writing" sense.

Now personally I'd be fairly surprised if most people who'd been through public education in the US would list many of their teachers among the creative people they'd encountered: maybe an art or music teacher; maybe that one special teacher.

Maybe education ought to be a creative profession, but in reality it tends to fall on the management side of the economy. Teachers are trained first and foremost to be classroom managers. Their personalities reflect managerial dispositions.

To a large extent, teachers have been mid-level managers. In addition they are child care and perhaps creative professionals. My guess is that the days of teachers as mid-level managers are short-lived. Mid-level management has long ago been squeezed out of most corporate cultures. I don't see why it can't be squeezed out of the education industry. That leaves child care, which is a necessary but deskilled function, and creative-professional activities.

You could argue that this is the central problem of the educational system. Yes you can point to testing and standards, and I agree with you. But hypothetically if you swept those away, what would our teachers do? Are they prepared to move forward as creative professionals? Testing and standards are constraints. There are many constraints. But creative professionals are always working within constraints; creativity is often defined by the constraints in which it transpires.

If teaching is a creative profession how do we develop the creativity of our future teachers? How do we attract students disposed to creativity to enter the field ? I think about this for my department's own programs preparing high school English teachers. When and where, if ever, do these students come to recognize themselves as creative professionals? How do we develop creativity?   

creativity and teaching

Listened to Sir Ken Robinson (mp3) at RSA last week (speech was last week, listened last night). You could call it an extended dance mix of his TED talk, but I found the elaborations useful and interesting. Usually when I write about teaching, I'm talking about technology or networks, but this is something different. Not wholly unrelated, at least in my mind, but different.

Robinson's point is that school systems are really headed in the wrong direction. If you think about it, that this is not shocking and disturbing ought to be disturbing in itself. Educational reform has generally meant trying to get better at doing the things we have always done. It has generally meant raising standards and pretty much more standardizing any way we can get it. The premise seems to be that schools require greater levels of centralized control and better quality control.

As everyone knows, it's a factory model.

Robinson is quick to note that the initial premise is really amazing. The notion of a public education, free at the point of service, is one of the great innovations of industrialization. Many have benefited from public education. Socially we have certainly benefited from public education. But millions more have not benefited, and socially we can no longer afford to ignore the potential of our children. And this is really Robinson's point, schools just drum out the creative potential in children and generally fail to see the value in the many, many kids who just don't fit the mold.

I certainly think about this in terms of my kids. They are both excellent performers in school, and they are both totally unchallenged. In each of their classes there are two kids repeating the grade. That seems like an awfully high percentage. There's no solution here except that we need to start thinking differently about education and addressing these problems on a more local level.

As such, it's a matter of going back to square one. If you're going to take my kids, and all the other kids in the neighborhood, for six hours a day and encourage them to learn and develop their interests, how would you do it?

Would you separate them by age, sit them at desks, and give them a series of formulaic assignments? Probably not.

If you tossed out all the learning goals and the standards that tell teachers what they have to do, what would they choose to do? Freed from institutional restrictions, how would they act? What kinds of teacherly communities would they form? What relationships would they build with parents and the local community?

I think first you'd have to let them go crazy for a while. You'd have to embrace chaos. You'd have to be incredibly patient. It would be like pedagogical detox for the whole community. Then I think you'd have to listen to the students and give them many ways to express themselves. You'd need to figure out who these kids were, what their interests and strengths might be. The grown-ups would need to have ongoing conversations as well.

Then the hard work would begin as you'd have to figure out plans for every student and map connections between them.

But my premise is simple here. How could we make elementary teacher into a creative and intellectually challenging job? B/c of course it should be that kind of job, teaching a community of children should demand such things. And that's not to say that many current teachers wouldn't be up to the challenge but only that the current system places little trust in them in terms of these things.

Sadly that's where we are. Of course Robinson puts this all in a very compelling way.

action media pedagogy

AMP. How's that for an acronym? Just kidding. I was reading Will Richardson and his reference to a Clay Shirky video. The Shirky video is mostly a discussion of the themes of his book, but Will picks up on this one little phrase about the move from "media for knowledge" to "media for action," meaning that now the organizational tools of networks allow us not only to share knowledge but to participate in collective action in powerful new ways. Shirky gives several examples from the book and one new example regarding the mafia in Palermo.

As we know, Shirky's main theme is that contemporary networks make it so much easier for everyday people to organize for any number of purposes that social networking is altering traditional relationships between people and the institutions upon which they used to rely for organizational infrastructure.

Anyway, I've been thinking about this in terms of our dear ol' institutions. The first (and ongoing) crisis of social networking was sharing media content. This didn't affect colleges directly, even though media content production is an integral part of our work. Obviously, no one really cares much about the pedagogic media content we produce; that is, students don't pay for access to content.

Much to our chagrin, they pay for the degree. But what does that certification represent? Well, expert testimony: I'll get back to that one. The other part is organization/coordination, e.g., curriculum. Here is where we can start to see changes if Shirky is right. What happens when you can freely coordinate content with easy and free/cheap organization? How hard would it be for a couple of English MAs or BAs to put together an undergrad lit studies curriculum just with freely available content? All the prof lectures you need are available here or there. All the pre-20th century literary texts are freely available. There's plenty of full-text databases available through public libraries if you need that. Even if you have to buy some material, the cost is very small compared to tuition. Then you set up a syllabus and a discussion board and just go. You can already see this in Facebook with an app like Supercool School.

Now you could say that you're going without the feedback from professors, but I went through my English BA with huge classes graded by TAs and occasional, research-free papers graded by professors who offered little more than a few check marks, a comment like "very good" and a grade. That's not optimal, but I don't believe you can argue that "feedback" is a necessary or integral part of an undergrad education

Of course you do need "expert testimony," someone who is qualified to say you've accomplished something. It seems to me though that you could accomplish this with some examinations and a portfolio review. So you could replace many colleges with an extended ETS-like service. Basically you could get rid of all the colleges in the middle. All those average colleges and all the students who attend them and graduate with sub 3.0 GPAs. You'd keep the top colleges for the top students and you'd keep the open admissions colleges for students who wouldn't have the literacy or educational habits to get a degree in this way.

Obviously I'm not recommending that future, but I could see how we could end up there. The other possibility is perhaps action media pedagogy.

packs roaming distributed learning environments

Read Gardner Campbell's recent post on Company Sense, by which he means a theatrical company or troupe and the type of relationships that can be built there. I've never been in a theater company, but I've been in a band and so I think I can understand the idea here of the kinds of connections and understandings that build between individuals through practice.

Also thinking about David Weinberger's thoughts about Anne Balsamo talking about her forthcoming book. All thinking in similar directions about "community," how we come together as producers and consumers of knowledge/media, as teachers and learners, as designers and users, etc: all of these dichotomies blending. There some particular binaries at work in these texts:

• Campbell critiques the distinction between hi-tech and hi-touch
• Balsamo calls upon C.P. Snow's two cultures and the use of collaboratories to move beyond them

Campbell speaks on how our notions of community rely upon direct communication, that the "hi-touch" relationship cannot survive the mediation by "hi-tech." This notion extends into learning communities. It is why we object to students with laptops in the classroom. It is what so many find difficult about the online course: building rapport with the students. This seems to run analogously to Snow's two cultures or at least as we have often characterized them. So if Balsamo calls for collaboration as a way of addressing technological challenges, Campbell remarks on the importance of developing particular affective relationships.

It's an old joke, but you could say that bands have their own version of Snow's two cultures: musicians and drummers. The point is that people with different perspectives, talents, and values elect to come together for a purpose... that's collaboration. And that they develop this "company sense" over time, through practice. Or they don't and they break up.

I approach this not in terms of companies or collaboratories but packs.

Web 2.0 and related applications in teaching

Now following on the prior post in a more practical vein. Here's a list of web 2.0 things I have used and/or will be using, with brief annotation.

So here are things I have used.

• Typepad for personal and course blogs
• Blogger for free personal student blogs
• PBwiki and Wikispaces for course wikis
• Delicious for sharing links with classes
• iTunesU for sharing secure media
• YouTube and Google Video for more open sharing of video
• Second Life for real-time group activities and exploration

Here's what I'm planning on adopting this year

• Ning to build community between courses
• Microblogging--not sure which app yet. Probably twitter.
• Seesmic--this will depend on the availability of web cams for students, though you can buy one for $30.

Spaces on the sidelines

• Facebook: I added the Courses app. I have friended students in the past. I will converse with students there if they initiate it. However I don't want to invade their space here.
• Flickr: I just haven't done much with sharing photos in my courses.
• Slideshare: this seems like a good option, so it's on my mind.
• Skype: thinking about this for office hours as an option. I usually use IM.

distributed learning environments

Following up on Charles' questions, I wanted to delve further into this term. In a way it's an old term. You can find people using it more than a decade ago in reference to online education. Here's a definition from 1995 in Syllabus (via):

Distributed learning is not just a new term to   replace the other 'DL,' distance learning. Rather, it comes from   the concept of distributed resources. Distributed learning is   an instructional model that allows instructor, students, and   content to be located in different, noncentralized locations   so that instruction and learning occur independent of time and   place. The distributed learning model can be used in combination   with traditional classroom-based courses, with traditional distance   learning courses, or it can be used to create wholly virtual   classrooms.

Indeed, one can go back further than this, but the point is that the term historically referenced the erasure of distance and the asynchronous quality of what is now conventional online learning. However, my sense is that more recently the term has come to distinguish a set of practices and values from those of the conventional, walled garden CMS (e.g. Blackboard). The term also bears some relationship to personal learning environments, though they aren't identical as PLEs might operate within a single, customizable system.

In the call to which I responded for On the Horizon the definition of distributed learning environments is left quite open, though from my non-techie perspective, they fall into two categories: