(Re)Creating Culture: Cell-Phone Novels

Last year, our freshman English sub department decided to stop teaching The Odyssey. This year is being spent reevaluating the kinds of literature that make sense for our technology-enhanced students. I don't teach the course this year, so I'm not sure what they're finding out. I was the leader of the group throughout the process, and sometimes I feel a pull, a guilt, for abandoning a classic, especially one that has meant so much to me at different times in my life. But I spent a chunk of time today reading an article that Bruce forwarded to me. It's from the New Yorker and takes a fascinating look at Japanese cell-phone novels and how they've shaped culture and modern publishing. All that, of course, interesting. But what got me thinking, or what aligned with what I think about a lot, is down near the end of the article, a comparison of cell-phone novels to The Tale of Genji. Here's an excerpt:

“The Tale of Genji,” considered by many to be the world’s first novel, was written a thousand years ago, in the Heian period, by a retainer of Empress Akiko at the Imperial Palace, in present-day Kyoto. The Heian was a time of literary productivity that also saw the composition of “The Pillow Book,” Sei Shonagon’s exquisitely detailed and refined record of court life, and a wealth of tanka poems. We know “Genji” ’s author by the name Murasaki Shikibu—Murasaki, or Purple, being the name she gave her story’s heroine, and Shikibu the name of the department (Bureau of Ceremonial) where her father at one time worked. Told episodically, and written mostly in hiragana, as women at the time were not supposed to learn kanji, it is the story of Genji, the beautiful son of the Emperor by a courtesan, who serially charms, seduces, and jilts women, from his rival’s daughter to his stepmother and her young niece Murasaki. “Genji” is the epitome of official high culture—it is to the Japanese what the Odyssey is to the Greeks—but some have noticed certain parallels with Japan’s new literary boom. “You have the intimate world of the court, and within that you have unwanted pregnancies, people picking on each other, jealousy,” the managing director of a large publisher said. “If you simply translate the court for the school, you have the same jealousies and dramas. The structure of ‘The Tale of Genji’ is essentially the same as a cell-phone novel.”

Yesterday, I was working on the "technology's effect on school culture" section of my Plan B literature review, and it got me thinking about how we might start to build unpredictability and cultural change into curriculum. For example, the guiding questions for our freshman English course are: Who Am I? How does my use of language shape me? What if they started to sound more like: Who Am I in person? Who Am I online? How does my creation of digital media and text shape?
Our sophomore questions are: What kind of world is this? How should we live in it? What about: What kind of world is this? How does technology shape and change our world? I don't know, something to that effect.
Point is: I get excited about the idea of taking classic sensibilities (literary structures, as discussed in the NYer article) and holding them up to modern uses of language. I moved a little in this direction this past semester by asking my students to analyze facebook correspondence as a way to improve the way they give feedback to each others' writing and ideas on blogs.

New Year, New Ideas From Literature Review

Winter break was nice. A trip to the mainland always makes me appreciate returning to the islands and to my work. While in the Bay Area, I had the opportunity to spend some time with a friend and colleague who's working in an education policy doctoral program. He's certainly busier than me, but we could commiserate over our respective grad school experiences thus far. We both agreed that's it's really hard as teachers to understand the sterile nature of education research. For some reason, we know that it "just doesn't work that way in a real classroom." So what's the purpose of the research. I find myself, 30 pages or so deep into writing my literature review, asking the question:

What can my school do with the research I'm reading and writing about?

How do I reconcile my own mistrust of numbers and standards based research findings?

How can I, once reconciled, translate the findings into a relevant recommendation?

My plan B project began having something to do with testing the viability of Tablet PCs in our evolving one-to-one laptop program. Four months later, the project has become an observation of our program's current reality and a set of next steps that I'm hoping will be useful in shaping the vision and implementation of 1700 laptop strong program.

An hour a night, I'm building a set of contentions about how a school might start thinking about a program of the sort we've committed to. And here's an attempt at sorting out and presenting some of the emerging themes:

-Technology is changing our culture in predictable and unpredictable ways. Introducing and "integrating" technology into schools will change school culture. There is a capability for transparency and meta-cognition unattainable up to this point in schools. Content is not scarce. Teachers can be bypassed in acquiring information. Teaching becomes more about learning how to learn, and learning how to make sense and meaning of information.

-Most of what schools have done with technology up to this point has been digitizing what they've always done. Social networking, collaboration, and communication are the real transformative technologies. While teaching and learning has been a traditionally isolated activity.

-The barrier between school and the outside world has been broken down. See cell phone videos of school hallways on YouTube; read real-time Facebook updates, for example.

-High expectations and standards can easily start to mean taking on more tasks, since technology continues to automate and cut down the time it takes to accomplish tasks.

-Committing a school to technology is committing to the unpredictable. That's hard to quantify.

-Ostensibly technology in schools was supposed to improve achievement. It's not having that effect, in general. But it is having an effect. What is it? What can/should we do with it?

-The biggest factor in a technology (delete the word "technology" because it's really about teaching and learning) program's success is in a school's ability to provide meaningful professional development and teachers' willingness to embrace school cultural change.

These are not my opinions necessary. They are themes that have emerged across the educational research. Now I have a set of look-fors to carry around with me on my campus. We've said that our one-to-one program will make learning more flexible, collaborative, and individualized. But what does that mean? And how does it intersect with what the research is reporting? How can we contribute what we're learning? The school culture will change? What change are we anticipating and or steering our school towards?

For A Friday: My Blog Wordle

Yesterday, in a sophomore English meeting, we broke into small groups to identify themes in quotes we all collected from our common reading: Proust and the Squid. With my partner, a conversation began to take shape around these questions: at what point does English class become effective communication class? In an English class, is the highest priority a students' development as a pen-to-paper/finger-to-keyboard writer? Or, is it more important for students to engage with and grasp the concepts and complexities of stories and essential questions? How important is the act of writing? Is dictating to a computer the same? Is it of equal value to us if a student does a better job expressing the complexities of an idea with a multimedia project vs. a written essay? And more questions along those lines. Of course, we have no answers...that's good. But the discussion of awareness of one's own use of language and the visual-ness of the digital world reminded me of what I'd seen on some blogs lately: Wordle. What a cool way for a student/writer to get a sense of the kind of words they use and how they create a certain kind of impact. Here's a Wordle for this blog:

Just Read Some Books And Call It A Class

Today at lunch, several colleagues and I were discussing a unit in our freshman and sophomore English courses known as the limited free choice book project, which equates to varying levels of choice depending on the teacher. I like to think of the way I frame the project in my class as "guided" free choice. The book choices are not limited or governed by me, but I move the students through a process focusing on making an informed choice about the book they're going to read.

Anyway, what I want to post about today is what I offered to the group over teri-tofu and chicken long rice soup: a class that was simply independent reading and blogging. This idea comes after a very successful three weeks of guided free choice reading and blogging in my class (and a free choice project). After the process of choosing books, we studied facebook and came up with a protocol for leaving comments and expanding others' ideas with conversation. This led to some really impressive student blogs. In addition, we studied the elements of books: first chapters, centers of gravity, questions that authors seem to be trying to answer in their chapters, metaphorizing, amongst other things. It didn't matter that we weren't reading the same stories because we had a common language for talking about literature. Along the way, students get a sense of their reading interests, strengths, and challenges, monitored and guided by me when necessary. I used the metaphor of a book universe that they create and explore. And it was all about using brain research to scaffold activities offering students differing paths to literacy and expert reading.

So many heads in books.

So, for the course I'm imagining, my colleagues challenged me on whether students could read graphic novels, children's books, Twilight and Harry Potter. The classic questions. So I thought I'd have them read from all genres: fiction, non-fiction, classic, graphic novel, fanfiction, etc., in any order they please. This is going to lead me to learning more about fanfiction, as well as books that accompany video games.

Are there courses like this out there? What do they look like? How well do they work?

Schools Of The Future Debrief Part 2: Innovation Management

I keep thinking about the concepts from Don Richardson's breakout session on "innovation management," in an attempt to transfer them to my K-12 school context. Richardson is Microsoft's Innovation Manager and is responsible for making the capturing of new ideas part of the work flow process at Microsoft. Their biggest fear is that good ideas walk out the door everyday just because somebody decided not to listen. He made the following claims before describing Microsoft's "idea grab" system.

-Research and development does not mean innovation. Innovation needs a shared framework.

-The best ideas come from inside organizations but have no process for being nurtured.

-The least amount of good ideas are generated externally.

-It's important to have a culture of innovation.

Microsoft's Process Looks Like:

Sounds a lot like the elements of critical thinking to me. So any employee can access this innovation process via portal/social network/collaborative workspace. And each idea gets entered, tracked, tagged, and peer reviewed as it moves its way through the process.

What if I had something like this interactive innovation database as part of my class curriculum? Students could enter ideas for learning opportunities and environments, and we could collaboratively work on them. The course would be collaboratively designed and amorphous.

In this spirit, today, I asked a student that I know is interested in architecture to think about and sketch his ideal classroom. We'll see what I get.

Or what if we had something like this as a network of teachers in a school (or across many schools). We'd build curriculum collaboratively. I could go back to ideas of teachers from 10 years ago and work with them with a fresh perspective. Maybe the school just wasn't ready for the idea, but now they are...

Don pointed to some examples in education:
Cosmic Blogs - for younger students
Lego Mindstorm
Both are examples of what Richard called "open innovation."

Other examples and ideas?

Schools Of The Future Debrief Part 1: "Disrupting Class"

Micheal Horn was the first keynote speaker at the conference (and one that made an impression on me), there to discuss the ideas in his book Disrupting Class, co-authored with Clayton Christensen (link's to their blog). Horn began with the question: why do successful organizations fail? This anchor question led to a discussion of the theory of disruptive innovation. Basically, that technology moves faster than what people need and/or want. So real innovation happens when there are areas of non-consumption that are ripe for a new model, new way of being. And this led to his discussion of technology in education.

He says, and so does all of the latest education research that I've been reading, that computers in classrooms have essentially failed, they haven't made a difference. At best, the most digital of conventional schools are simply digitizing the same old teaching and learning techniques. Or, they're cramming disruptive technologies into old paradigms. Sure, small gains have been made in small pockets (charter schools mostly). But on the whole, not much meaningful innovation in schools.

In his slides he presents an argument for 50% of education being online by 2019, using some pretty complex graphs and charts. The basis for this contention was mainly the usual suspect: mandates vs. the way we really learn. And, that what are disruptive technologies now will reach innovative status in education by 2019 or so. In online education, as the technology and vision catch up, it's easy to see that I could teach all 18 students in my sophomore English class, for example, according to their individual learning styles and needs, and I could track those learning needs, and teach them how they learn best and how to be the best learner they can be.

In addition, Horn listed areas of non-consumption in education, just waiting for a little educational entrepreneurship:
-Credit Recovery
-Drop Outs
-AP courses
-Schedule Conflicts
-Homeschool and Homebound Students (over 2 million of them today)
-Small Urban and Rural Schools
-Tutoring
-Pre-K

He goes on to name areas of global education non-consumption:
-3 million worldwide that don't attend primary school
-200+ million worldwide that don't attend secondary school
-Budget Pressures
-Barriers of distance, security, and infrastructure

Finally, Horn named some examples of places and companies that seem to be getting it:
-Singapore
-K-12 ed in Dubai
-Rubicon
-Mobile Solutions
-NACOL

Now excuse me while I go start planning my online school:)

Jam Session Learning

For me, going to a conference is not really about the conference, per se, it's more about the juxtaposition of the travel, conference events, visits with friends and other schools, and mostly stepping outside of individual school context for a fresh perspective. So while I'll go on to post and share about some specific conference sessions and related reflections and ideas, I first want to frame those posts with some of the extracurricular experiences I had while spending 8 days in my Washington state hometown and commuting by ferry boat each morning to the Schools of the Future World Summit hosted by Microsoft.

One of the highlights of my trip (besides the conference) was spending an afternoon and evening with two of my best friends. The three of us went to school together K-college, and spent just about every free minute outside of class in any given basement, writing music in the form of several permutations of rock band. We called ourselves Injured By Green, then Wish Cotton Was A Monkey, then The Chucks.

I bring this up for two reasons:
1. In the process of writing the literature for my MEd Plan B, I came across a metaphor for learning in the 21st century that I've been expanding ever since: "Jam Session Learning." So I talked about this with my buddies, one the leader of a development group for a high profile technology company, the other a professional jazz musician. Amongst a lot of ideas, several floated to the surface for the purpose of this post.

First, having a band sticks out to all of us as one of the most significant learning experiences of our "school" careers. Our jam sessions were a time and place to debrief and process all the information we had gathered during the day or week, and make something new, make sense of it. And for contrived school projects, we had a natural group of diverse learners playing off each others' strengths and compensating for challenges. We remembered taking our English class vocabulary list and writing song lyrics around them. Similarly, as high school freshman, it was hard to get into the music scene in our little county, so we decided to put on our own rock show, giving our band a place to play. In the process, we had to acquire a venue, rent a PA system, hire the bands, market the concert, and have a cause. We did all of this ourselves, and by the end of the show, each band (6) walked away with over $1000 and we donated truckloads of food to our local Food Bank. Funny that we didn't really think anything of this experience until later in life, as I'm hearing about schools like Hip Hop High and High Tech High. The concert bleeped on our collective radar screen when a Facebook group popped up for people throughout the years that had in some way been a part of the music scene in our county, and the concert was the subject of random reminiscing. These are concepts that I plan to explore in more depth as I synthesize my conference week and blog here.

Reason #2. I haven't blogged much lately. I think it started to feel like it wasn't part of my job, just something extra. I'm going to grad school full-time and teaching full-time and expecting a child for the first time. But mostly I've let myself get stuck in a place that David Foster Wallace describes in "The Nature of the Fun." Basically, he describes how writing starts off as really fun because it's honest. Soon, once an audience develops, self-consciousness challenges the original fun. The writer has some expectation of the audience's expectations, and just like that, the writing becomes "shitty."

So every year, my band entered the school talent show. Freshman year, we were the defending champions. During the rehearsal, there was a double controversy with our performance. First, we wanted to play two songs but were only allowed one. Second, we had a particular lyric that was objectionable to the school, not because of any "swear" words just because of the idea. Naturally, we problem solved and made a tough decision. We used a cymbal roll to make two songs into one; and, we said we'd change the lyric, but on stage, we didn't change it.
I'm not inspired to be inappropriate, but after the SOTF conference, I've realized how significant this blog is to my professional development and how important it is to remember the nature of this fun.

Socrates Would Go... 2.0

I've been dropping knowledge from Proust and the Squid in just about every conversation for the last week or so, and using the research and questions to drive my lesson planning. I'm only 90 pages deep but just finished a section about Socrates's protests of written language. It's not in front of me to quote (and I gotta blog when I have time) but he essentially said that written language will destroy the memory, for one, and that it gives words and ideas an authority that they shouldn't necessarily be afforded. Dialogue, on the other hand, requires memorization and analysis of all hitherto cultural knowledge, and leaves ideas up for challenge and revision. Wolf points out that Socrates's concerns are the same as our modern concerns about digital literacy and communication.

But there's a different comparison that has me thinking and questioning. She also points out that Plato, all the while, is putting Socrates's dialogues to writing. He had a better guess at what might be possible with the written word. Socrates didn't live long enough to see writing past its infancy. That's where I find myself and my school one year into a one-to-one laptop initiative. There are so many issues: distraction, bullying, superficial knowledge, reliance on Google, memorization-what's that. And there are maybe just a few places where the integration of technology has made better, after the cost-benefit analysis, teaching and learning. And mostly, I think we find ourselves doing the same things, just digitally.

I find myself in a funny place, between the two camps. I love my noteback and paperback, but don't have whole poems or books memorized. I can see the benefits of digital literacy, but how do I balance it all, helping my students navigate a new form of communication meaningfully. Sometimes it feels like a lot of guesswork, in the company of Plato, I guess I can deal. I think Socrates would have a blog too, since the written word has been networked. Authority of voice and content is a different matter now. Conversation doesn't necessarily entail only the auditory.

Can't wait to make it through the next few chapters and the discussion of how to purposefully teach new and old literacies.

"Bawds of Euphony"

Today, we had a Sophomore English: Critical Thinking sub department meeting. There are ten of us, and we take turns each meeting running through a lesson from our respective class. Hopefully, the lesson leverages our one-to-one laptop environment in some way. The lesson today was a critical thinking exercise using Wallace Steven's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."

The subject of this post is not really the lesson, rather, something that came up within the activity. A very 21st century question. The activity had us in partners, posting ideas about a stanza to a Moodle forum, where other sets of partners answer meta questions about our original ideas.

My partner and I had stanza ten, which includes the phrase "bawds of euphony." Better look that one up. As a phrase search, Google takes us straight to a scholarly (or maybe pseudo-scholarly) essay explicating the stanza. There we go. Being the fun-loving English teachers we are, we continued the activity by looking up each words individually in the dictionary. These definitions helped us form our own idea.

So the question is: how do we teach critical thinking if students have easy access to somebody else's (an expert's?) critical thinking?

It doesn't work to say "don't use those sites." That'll be as effective as scaring students away from Sparksnotes.

Finding somebody's thinking isn't the same as doing your own thinking.

My initial idea was, well, you do the activity. Then, you teach students how to conduct a scholarly search, find some materials, and hold them up to the class's discussion to identify similarities and differences.

BTW - that's a pic of an albino blackbird

Reinventing My Job

Well, I've been busy, and the blog was one of the first things to neglect. But I've realized that its penchant for helping me reflect and synthesize is actually exactly what I need. So I'm starting with what I'm doing for my school this year and the big questions for each project.

Project
Leading a pilot of Tablet PCs in a school of all Macs. (This is also my M.Ed. plan B).
Questions
What do students and teachers gain/lose in a cross-platform environment?
What will it take to support?
What kinds of learners will benefit from a different interface? And how?

Project
Coaching 10th grade teachers in their first year of teaching in one-to-one laptop environment.
Questions
What kinds of technology enhanced activities support good teaching and learning?
What do we need to know about reading and the brain when we consider online texts and materials?

Project
Stay out in front of new and effective tools, practices, and research while being one of four Technology Resource Teachers in a high school with more than 150 teachers and 800 students in the one-to-one program.
Questions
How to balance?

I've spent the last four days working pretty much non-stop on two final presentations. Up until I started this graduate program, I really hadn't used Powerpoint or Keynote very much, as a presenter or a teacher. But the slideshow format has been extremely popular with my instructors, giving me some time to fine-tune my skills and thoughts about the use of this tool. What I realized first, actually it was just reinforced, I already thought it, was that slides can be the most agonizing method of presenting information when they're full of bullet-points that get read back to you.

Luckily, I remembered a book that Howard Levin mentioned in a session at this year's Kamehameha technology conference in Honolulu: Presentation Zen. Promptly, I bought the book and started reading. I love the guidelines about not asking people to read slides and listen at the same time, including no more than six words per slide, and using high quality images that demonstrate ideas. Finally, Reynolds explains that if you don't need to be there to explain the slides, the material shouldn't be communicated in the form of a presentation.

What I've learned and practiced has me excited to bring presentations into my curriculum. Working on my own presentation has been the perfect critical thinking exercise, the decisions about the precision of words, the search for just the right image to convey emotion and idea, not to mention that preparedness to speak that all this preparation instills. And I'm wondering if there are others out there that use presentations as this kind of thinking exercise?

Dewey For Dummies

This is education philosopher week in my grad program. And I'm busy working on an essay in which I'm supposed to examine, based on my readings, the role of independent schools and their intersection with public interest and purpose. The philosopher that's been most interesting to me is John Dewey, not because of his timeless influence on American schools but because of the contradictions between his philosophy and the way it's interpreted and put into practice.

Watered down, my understanding of Dewey's philosophy is that education has no end; it's an end in itself. The more education a person has, the better equipped he/she is to make decisions and live life based on a broad, global perspective that empathizes with the most peoples' needs and ideas. His explanation of the interdependence of the individual and society reminded me of my recent rereading of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and its discussion of the same interdependence, not the individual, not the whole, something else. Dewey attempts to do away with the usual duality in education.

In practice, Dewey's vision looks like a series of ever-expanding, diverse experiences (ideas and interactions included). And what strikes me, based on my experience as a public school teacher in the NCLB era, is that this is exactly what public school is not, in many cases. Diversity is valued as a buzz word but not a reality; variety in ideas is neglected for practice of testable skills and aptitudes...

After A 4-Month Vacation

It's been exactly four months since my last post, at which point I was feeling like I'd lost my focus. Originally, I started this blog to figure out whether it was viable to use with my students. It was/is. Then, I joined in with others writing about educational technology. That still interests me but it's confining as I'm not really a tech person; I'm a teacher, and now I'm getting an M.Ed. in private school leadership. I can feel my role and perspective transforming daily.
I've missed my blog the whole time but also felt as though it had taken time away from some of the things that I love and need for balance, namely surfing. But the graduate program has helped me see blogging differently. And being a student again in a program that's condensed an entire year of course work into six intense weeks has taught me a lot about myself as a learner, and even more about being a student in the 21st century. Needless to say, I have a lot to talk about, perfect time to revive WatsonCommon.
Related to keeping this blog, what I know about myself is that I need routine and commitment. I can't just say I'll post when I have something to post. So my renewed commitment to this blog is 500 words (max), 4 times a week. We'll see how that goes…
I want to start today by relating one thing I've been experiencing as a student, and hopefully some of you (if you're still out there) will have some anecdotes to share too.
A few weeks ago, I skyped from Hawaii to Boston with my colleague as he was giving an introduction to web 2.0 tools during an edtech conference session. He wanted me to talk about my favorite web2 tool and give some examples of how I use it. I went with wikis because I think they're so flexible, easy, and secure. I talked a little about global collaborations I've been a part of, and I described how I'd started a wiki for my grad school cohort (the same 29 people go through all the courses and Plan B action research project together). I thought the cohort could share resources and notes, follow up with more discussion, and organize a resource to use forever. It' been a great exercise for me to see how students make use of the wiki. For the first five weeks (remember, only six), the wiki was me taking notes, occasionally somebody would send me something they thought would be worth posting, and I would post it. But late last week, and more and more this week, others are starting to post links and ideas. The lesson for me is that when I ask my classes to use wikis, which I've done a bunch of times, I don't really know what I'm asking them to do because I had never done it until now. Does anybody else have experience using a wiki? I think it's different than using it with a professional learning community.