The second video takes up the story from the young girls point of view. As an educator this video is downright cringe-worthy when they portray the students in class sitting hands folded in rows and columns while the teacher lectures, albeit with very pretty visuals. This is where business shows that it knows nothing about education and especially education of the near future. They do get it somewhat right when they have the video table where the students grab color swaths and use it to select images based on the colors and combination of colors. It’s horrifying when outdate modes of teaching show up in “visions of the future” videos. The lesson here is that even if it’s in a virtual environment, we learn by doing not by sitting in lectures. My moto is if the information needs to be delivered as a monologue or lecture, do a video and post it for students to go over before getting together for class. If we’re “together” we’re doing, or reviewing, not lecturing. Ack! Future education vision FAIL!

Sources:

• image: Wall of Screens Lifestyle by Joe Bustillos
• Youtube video: A Day Made of Glass 1 Uploaded by CorningIncorporated on Feb 7, 2011. Watch “A Day Made of Glass” and take a look at Corning’s vision for the future with specialty glass at the heart of it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=6Cf7IL_eZ38 retrieved 2/9/2012.
• Youtube video: A Day Made of Glass 2 Uploaded by CorningIncorporated on Feb 3, 2012. http://bit.ly/xITx1H – Watch and share “A Day Made of Glass 2,” Corning’s expanded vision for the future of glass technologies. This video continues the story of how highly engineered glass, with companion technologies, will help shape our world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZkHpNnXLB0&feature=youtu.be retrieved 2/9/2012.

In the meantime, one of the more interesting presentation that I attended was by Rachel Smith, called: Visual Note-Taking with the iPad. At first I was thinking that this was a giant step backward in terms of using the iPad to create notes that weren’t really searchable. Ack. But this also reminded me of the recent whiteboard videos where an artist takes a talk and creates a real-time info-graphic of the talk (a la Dan Pink’s video on Drive). This also reminded me of a friend who used poster-board graphics to improve student literacy (something called Project Glad, back in the day). Check out Smith’s video:

I just watched the Apple Education event keynote and I’m very excited about what I saw. If you haven’t seen today’s keynote yet, run, do not walk to your local device (I got a better connection via my iPad projecting the keynote to my TV) and sit a spell. Nope, Schiller will never have Steve’s dynamic style, but the content is definitely something that we need to be keenly aware of. In a word they are taking book publishing and specifically textbook publishing, and taking it to the next level. The textbook will not be a static collection of words and images frozen at printing but have the portability of a book, the videos and interactivity of a networked computer and the freshness of blog pages, while retaining formatting, typography and layout that tends to be lacking in web-based textbooks.

I was going to try my hand at getting Udutu to work for my stand-alone copyright unit but I’m now going to investigate the possibility of using iBook Author to make the unit. Now we know where all the iWeb brain-power went over the last couple years. And I’m curious to see Full Sail will continue to experiment with iTunes U, in that iTunes U seems determined to become it’s own LMS and not just a lecture delivery vehicle.

I’ve been getting emails from QuarkXpress begging me to check out their new iPad/ePub friendly $299 app (if you have a previous version of QuarkXpress). They’ve got to be peeing their pant. I wonder how Schoology feels about Apple putting more effort/muscle behind iTunes U with added assignment and communication features. Yikes.

Enjoy. jbb

3d Person Taking Class by David Castillo Dominici

What does one expect when about to tour a public school described as innovative and tech-savvy? Classrooms filled with rows and rows of white gleaming tables populated by endless computer monitors under antiseptic white fluorescent lights? Giant wall monitors in the office and all common areas with the day’s activities scrolling below a looping-video of a professionally produced virtual tour of the school given by an smiling young woman? White-headphone wearing students silently gliding from class to class on hover-boards? Up until the last one, I probably had you thinking, “Yeah.” I had the opportunity to visit a very innovative school the other day and you know what I noticed? The place looked pretty much like any school I’d visited where teachers were interacting with students and students were engaged in their learning. In other words, the place wasn’t a shrine to shiny technology, but educators were busy working with their students using technology. Period.

I’d heard about Audubon Park Elementary in Baldwin Park from coworker, Dr. Bedard, who said that it was as an innovative place where, unlike many schools, students were encouraged to bring their tech from home in the form of e-readers and iPads to the classroom. That piqued my interest. Oh yeah, she also confirmed what we’d heard from other coworkers, that many classrooms have students sit at tables in groups of four on yoga-balls bouncing up and down as they do their work. Interesting. So, while there is tech in the classrooms, the place is not a shrine to technology. Educators, beginning with the principal, Trevor Honohan, have chosen to find effective ways to do their job using technology.

Assistant principal Bryan Dolfi told me that the change began over a year ago when Principal Honohan saw how much impact the installation of interactive promethean boards had and began to look for ways to encourage the classroom interaction. Dolfi said that they were fortunate to be located in an somewhat affluent neighborhood and worked with the community and parents of the 1,150 K-5 students to raise funds to add netbooks to the classrooms. I asked Dolfi how the staff of a bit over one-hundred took to the change. I’ve been on school sites that were awarded huge grants with the accompanying radical influx of technology only to have a third of the staff leave because they were asked to use the technology in their teaching and they felt like it was too much to ask. Dolfi took me to look in on a classroom where the teacher was using the Promethean board, standing at the back of the room asking her students items from their science unit. I’ve been on enough school tours to known when I’m watching the technology-dog-and-pony-show for the visitor and when I’m watching something that’s part of the day to day routine and this was the real thing. Then Dolfi added after we left the room that the instructor had been one of the less tech-savvy one’s who had been scared to use the tech only a year ago and now she was one most called upon to help others get comfortable using the tech. Interesting.

Teacher with students in class - Microsoft Office clipart

Teachers set up to succeed, learning how to use technology in the context of their day-to-day job in a way that helps them reach and work with their students, which make the students more engaged, which makes the parents happy, which make the principal and district happy. This isn’t a story about technology but about smart dedicated people taking advantage of the tools within reach (or making it so that the tools are within reach) and then getting to the job of learning and serving their students. No giant screens with intrusive booming messages or hover boards or student/drones wearing white-earphones, just teachers, students, administrators and communities working together (and taking advantage of tech).

Sources:
Audubon Park Elementary School
Trevor Honohan — Principal
Bryan Dolfi — Assistant Principal
1750 Common Way Road
Orlando, Florida 32814

• image: Computer Classroom by sixninepixels, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2680 retrieved 1/14/2012
• image: 3d Person Taking Class by David Castillo Dominici, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=3062 retrieved 2/14/2012
• image: Teacher with students in class – Microsoft Office clipart, http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/results.aspx?ex=2&qu=reading%20classroom#ai:MP900439545|mt:0| retrieved 1/14/2012

A link showed up in my twitter-stream to a website dedicated to the belief that they got ripped off attending the university where I teach. It was more than a tad depressing to have my university called a diploma mill or that it’s accredited by the same organization that accredits dog grooming schools. I’d say that the person behind the website was one unhappy customer/client/former-student. I wish that I could say that this was a new experience but we’ve had a few students… former student go-postal on their Facebook pages. Thus, I normally wouldn’t waste energy on the disgruntled rantings of an unhappy former-student, but the added one-two-three combo of this website and the call for greater government scrutiny on for-profit universities recruiting practices plus the $100,000 challenge from a silicon valley millionaire questioning the value of college challenged me to also ask: What are you getting for your college education dollar?

To start with, what follows are my own observations as an educator (K-8 & university) and lifelong student and does not represent anyone’s official opinions about anything. Okay, that out of the way, anyone who tries to reduce a college education to post-college Benjamins is going to be sorely disappointed because a “satisfied life” cannot be reduced to Benjamins. Period. I have long held the belief that a college education in the early part of the previous century was meant for the rich and the upper-middle class, to give their young men (and women) greater experiences of the larger world that they would later apply to helping with the family empire/business. After World War II and the G.I. Bill the possibility of a college education became much more universal. And as with many things in the 1960s to 1980s, somehow the possibility became an imperative and instead of being an option for the ambitious became the destination for those trying to find themselves. The traditional university as the road to riches lost its historic moorings and started to believe its own PR.

Image: smokedsalmon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I began my college experiences in the mid-1970s and as the son of Latino working-class parents I was lucky enough to benefit from the belief that there weren’t enough Latinos pursuing college degrees. This gave me access to scholarships and student loans that helped me as I earned my three college degrees and worked toward my doctorate. It might not have seemed fair to some that I benefitted from the under-representation of my heritage, but my mom always said that one must take advantage of any opportunity life presents, understanding that luck might open the door but it’s going to take hard work to see things through. So I looked at my own experience as one I was lucky enough to have had, by no means something I was entitled to and not something that was meant to make me rich somehow. The latter fact didn’t always translate well for some.

One weekend when visiting the folks during my sophomore year at Loyola Marymount University my dad sat me down, put the LA Times in front of me and told me that I wasn’t to get up until I had circled all of the jobs in the Wanted section that I was qualified to do with my one-year-plus of university. He meant well, but didn’t understand when I tried to explain that it doesn’t work that way. It probably didn’t help that I was a Religious Studies major at a Catholic university and my Christianity of choice was with the other guys, Protestantism. On many levels this didn’t make any sense to my folks. If college isn’t something connected with getting a better job, then what’s the point?

Well, this isn’t meant to be a smart ass answer, but I guess it depends on where you are at life, what your educational objectives are and what options are open to you. The answer is very different for an 18-year-old with no responsibilities, no obvious skills or gifts but an unconfessed fantasy to be a rock star (not me!) versus a 30-something single mom who likes to paint versus a newly unemployed 40-something journalist from a small-town paper. And reducing the equation to just money cuts one off from countless possible options. In fact the first thing to consider is that one does have options and that the goal has to be something more meaningful than what is easy and what is going to get one the big bucks. Add to that, one has to realize that there is no one answer for any of us.

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I had one friend I was jealous of because he cruised straight through university as an accounting major, landed a solid job right out of college and married the boss’s daughter. Then out of nowhere, he quit his job and opened a mattress retail business with his wife (also an accounting graduate) running the back office while he sold mattresses to OC folks who weren’t happy with their sleeping situation. Switching from a name-brand accounting firm to running a retail establishment wasn’t anything that I could have anticipated, but in the end he was happy and seemed to be on solid ground. Conversely, I’ve known my fair share of undergrads who drifted in and out of several majors before they looked at their transcripts late in the game and selected a degree program based on what would require the fewest additional units for them to graduate. Surprise, they ended up with a degree in something completely unrelated to anything they cared about, much less loved. So, one should not be hindered by the thought that there can only be one path. Additionally, the straight line isn’t always the quickest one to one’s goal. There’s also the part where one should not expect to get out of an experience beyond what one is willing to put into it.

I sat in a classroom for one of my teacher training credential courses at an expensive private university and the instructor had set things up so that a few of us would give presentations on language acquisition issues every class session, until everyone in the course had done a presentation. Consequently very little time was spent with the professor doing any lecturing. At one point, when the professor wasn’t in the room, a student loudly complained that we were all doing the work and that the professor wasn’t doing anything. How was this worth the thousands of dollars we were spending taking this class if we’re doing all of the work, she demanded. Not that she was actually interested in any attempt at an answer, but by this time I fully understood that it wasn’t about sitting in on lectures, but what happens beyond the lectures. A good college education is a combination of passionate educators who have pulled together powerful and timely curriculum and engaged learners working together to synthesize the curriculum into their own practices and understanding, in the end adding to it as the learning is passed forward to the next generation. What is generally missed by those bitching about getting ripped off by their institution is that one generally gets what they put into the endeavor. It’s not enough to have the best in the industry as instructors using cutting edge techniques and equipment if the students are just going through the motions. There is a great burden on instructors to strive to pull out the best and inspire their students, but ultimately it is a partnership between instructors and students that will make a difference. It’s too easy for instructors AND students to blame each other for a less than satisfying experience. It’s a combined effort and if all parties have been hard at it but are finding no fruit then it’s time to move on. Period.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It’s good that college recruiters are held accountable for what they promise, but this is true all around whether one is looking at traditional universities or at for-profit institutions. Let the buyer (student) be ware. But also one has to let go of the idea that it’s the institution’s or it’s staff’s responsibility to turn undisciplined teenagers into solid academics or award winning artists. It’s a partnership that demands from both parties. I’ve attended five private colleges and universities and one state university and there was not a perfect one in the whole bunch. But when I was there I was inspired to learn and push myself harder than anyone would have expected from me. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the only way to a better life is through a college education. But if you do have the chance to spend time learning something you care about deeply from the best in the field, grab it and make it part of your life story. At the same time don’t buy the line that the only way out is by paying big bucks to some institution that will give you a piece of paper and that will magically lead to the land of riches. The piece of paper is just a symbol of what you have accomplished and mastered while at the institution. What will get you the job is what you can do and the expertise and passion that you uniquely bring to the effort.

It’s a mistake to expect a college education to be one’s economic panacea. It’s also a mistake to discount the opportunities presented with a college education as a frivolous waste of time and money. Some learn the lessons of life despite the college curriculum and some have to retake the courses over and over again before it starts to make sense. Some wear the cap and gown but never graduate and some graduate long before their courses are complete. And some never get it.

At one point in my journey I made a lot more money working for the phone company than I did as an educator. And if it had just been about money then I wouldn’t have quit the phone company job to teach 6th graders in Hawaiian Gardens, making half the pay for twice the work. But like my university experiences, teaching pushed me and made me a better person for the effort. And my time with the phone company had made me a trouble-shooter, not hindered by the “way things are done” when it came to my classroom. So, it wasn’t the straight-line or the big bucks, but I got something from every experience. I’m proud of all of the institutions and experiences and I cannot imagine my journey without the years spent challenging and being challenged by my professors, colleagues and eventually, my own students. It’s sour-grapes and childish to blame the institution. But this isn’t to say that there aren’t those out there looking to take your educational dollars with less than honest intentions. It’s important to choose wisely, like anything else that you might spend tens of thousands of dollars on. You shouldn’t need a college education to figure that one out. Well, most shouldn’t.

Resources:

• College Montage by Joe Bustillos. Source files: (top, left to right) http://pastriesandbacon.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/side-note-its-gym-time-baby/, http://buzznet.com/~13d1747, http://theskyisbig.blogspot.com/2011/01/fuller-seminary-library-at-sunset.html, http://www.akahmai.com/blog/?p=1284, http://calstate.fullerton.edu/news/2009/014-us-news-world-report-ranking.html, http://www.squidoo.com/biola-university?utm_source=google&utm_medium=imgres&utm_campaign=framebuster, Retrieved 11/04/2011.
• For-profit colleges under fire over unpaid loans – Houston Chronicle, http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/For-profit-colleges-under-fire-over-unpaid-loans-1702408.php, retrieved 11/4/2011.
• PayPal Co-Founder Hands Out $100,000 Fellowships To Not Go To College : The Two-Way : NPR, http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/25/136646918/paypal-co-founder-hands-out-100-000-fellowships-to-not-go-to-college?sc=fb&cc=fp retrieved 11/4/2011.
• FRONTLINE: College, Inc. 01/04, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJSPkXiVDhE&feature=youtube_gdata_player retrieved 11/4/2011.
• For-Profit Colleges Under Fire – CBS News Video, http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6838088n retrieved 11/4/2011.
• Thiel Fellowship Pays 24 Talented Students $100,000 Not to Attend College – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/article/Thiel-Fellowship-Pays-24/127622/ retrieved 11/4/2011.
• Is a College Education Worth It? – FilEntrep: The Millionaire Mindset!, http://filentrep.com/is-a-college-education-worth-it retrieved 11/4/2011.
• PayPal Co-Founder Gives Out $100,000 To Not Go To College – Slashdot, http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/26/1322248/paypal-co-founder-gives-out-100000-to-not-go-to-college retrieved 11/4/2011.
• Image: smokedsalmon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2038 retrieved 11/4/2011.
• Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1152
• Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=659 retrieved 11/4/2011.

Watch the full episode. See more Digital Media – New Learners Of The 21st Century.

Watching this as a educator and knowing how little “the public” seems to understand whats happening makes me think of the title: Education: It’s Complicated. Thanks emdt student, John Carter for the heads-up.

I just had a chat with Karl Peterson, current month 12 student, he called to share that he’d met a professor, Jim Groom, at the University of Mary Washington who’s doing a course on Digital Storytelling as an open university course. According to Peterson, Groom has no formal ed tech training but is mirroring a lot of what we’re doing in emdt. You can visit his course at http://ds106.us. Awesome.

Then when I was on the ds106 site I noticed a Internet Radio player and on the player at that particular moment was someone I’d met through twitter @DrGarcia, the Gypsy Rogue Scholar. Woe, I know that she’s mentioned doing an internet radio show, but that’s way too “we’re all connected” for me. And as I’m writing this, they’re playing a mash-up on copyright, my area of concentration. The universe is scaring me.

You can get more info on radio-ds106 at http://ds106.us/ds106-radio/ and http://bit.ly/radio4life. Yeah, there are more of us experimenting and creating new media in education (mostly ’cause the old system is dead).

I don’t know if this governor expected such a huge backlash and just assumed that the unions would take it lying down. So let me say it plainly, this isn’t about balancing a budget as much as political bullshit. Fix the problems. The unions have shown that they will work with you, if you actually had a working plan. Here’s the link to the NPR story: The Long-Term Effect Of Wisconsin’s Union Battles.

WI “Budget Repair Bill” Protest (Feb 20-24?) Pt. 3 from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

We are peaceful. We will stay peaceful.

Around four days of footage (Feb 20-24?) from Madison, WI protest against the SB11 “budget repair bill.”

You can see all the amazing emails I’ve been receiving from people all over the country here: www.mgwisni.posterous.com/​

Mgwisniphoto@gmail.com If you would like to embed the video somewhere, please email me. Please keep sending me encouraging emails of support from wherever you are.

Why do we do what we do? Some might respond that asking such questions is a typical first-world problem, that it’s the modern equivalent to trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head because with so many people going hungry in the world and in our own country, how dare we waste time entertaining such things as “motivation.” It should be pretty damn clear that we do what we do so that we can feed ourselves and our families and keep out the dangers of the outer world. It’s all about higher and higher levels of survival. Once you have enough bread for the day, then you need to make sure that you have enough bread for the week and then once you have that you need to make sure that you never go without having enough bread. But can one ever have enough bread?

During 1980s and early 1990s I worked for a local telco as a well-paid technician. We worked in a union-shop so whenever we worked overtime we got time-and-a-half and if we worked enough over-time early in the week we could reach double-time. With construction booming in Southern California there was a lot of over-time to be had. I noticed that the technicians who were the best at what they did liked getting the over-time pay but were motivated to do the quality job that they did because they liked fixing problems and liked being good at it. The technicians who were just about getting the over-time pay rarely were the ones one could count on to get the job done right the first time. In fact, for all of the time they put in, they could be guaranteed as spending most of their time avoiding work. And neither group like having management breathing down their necks, telling them what to do at every turn. Even the self-motivated ones would let things slip through the cracks because micro-managing stole their incentive to do better. Just like the video said, getting properly compensated helped, but it was no guarantee that the job would get done. When I left the phone company to go teach we were working so much overtime that it was almost a 50% cut in pay for me to leave. And even much later when I left California to come to Florida I took another huge cut in pay. One has to make a living and should be able to do so without resorting to endless part-time gigs, but it’s not about the pay. It’s unfortunate that it’s generally only highly funded companies like Google, where they have a 20% time policy where employees can work on personal projects for 20% of their on-job time, where they explore such things as “motivation.” Too bad.

by emdt student, by Saray Taylor-Roman

I was touched in so many levels by the first four chapters of this book. And, I feel like sharing this personal anecdote.

In 1996, my whole family moved to the U.S. from Mexico because my dad was getting his master’s degree. My sister and I did not know any English and this was the day before school. Our parents called us to the living room and told us something that went like this: we want you to know that to us you are the most beautiful, intelligent, funny, and amazing daughters in the whole world and nothing or no one will make us think differently of you. We know that you don’t know any English. We know that you will struggle, and when you get a failing grade, we want you to know that we will see an A because we see the effort you put in, because we see you growing, because we see you becoming women of outstanding character. Don’t worry about grades, go live and enjoy our two years here. Make the most of it and if in the way, your grades happen to be A’s, so be it… That evening, a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders, I was no longer scared, I was ready to take over the world!

Needless to say, my sister and I did extremely well. Due to language immersion, we were proficient in English within 4 months. I went on to tutor in Spanish, French, and Chemistry after school and took some extra courses to graduate a year early. My parents believed in me and that made the difference. I was given an A and the rest was history.

Sources:
Original post, http://thetaylor-roman.blogspot.com/2011/02/wk2-reading-initial-response.html posted 02/09/2011

“Labs Versus Classrooms” is a video essay about the most effective ways to implement technology on a school site.


“Goldilocks & Tech Implementations” is a video essay about how to properly implement a tech program.

“Tools to Manage The Classroom” is a video essay detailing my first experiences using technology as a classroom teacher.

“Tools to Create Curriculum” is a video essay about how I used technology to meet the needs of my students beginning from my first years as a classroom teacher to being school site tech coordinator.

Two Bonus videos:

An introductory look at the video journalism program that I created using 5th grade reporters/editors and 6th grade news-anchors and studio personal. We even had second graders reading the news

“Welcome 2 the Real World” was a music video inspired by the 80s Jane Child song. Students wrote a paragraph about what the word “Real World” mean to their parents and I recorded them reading their essays and added that to footage I’d shot in Downtown Long Beach.

Pretty much every month someone in class has a problem with Zander’s chapter about Giving an A. This month’s dialogue questions the motivational power of grades (with little Beatles whimsy thrown in for good measure). One student wrote the following in their blog:

We all live in a yellow submarine or we should live in an Octopus’s Garden. I am torn with the ideology that he pronounces. I understand what he is saying but grades and competition are not always a comparison or a barrier for rick and moving outside the box. Depending on the demeanor or personality make-up of a person these things cause the very things that the author says they hinder. For some grades and goals and standards are the fuel that drives their cars. They need them as much as they hinder others. For others they are a compass; the study is like an ocean and they are in a small boat in the middle of it at high noon. There is no point of reference and on their own there is no way to know if they are going forward or backward. It would be nice if by the elimination of grades and competition there would be an explosion of risk takers, ready to shed off the clothing of anxiety and dread and go running blissfully through the field daisies. Love, peace and rock & role. It does sound like something out of the hippie era of free love and anti-establishment. I love his pronouncements intellectually but experimentally it does not meet my reality. I gets back to perception and changing that within ourselves. For me, in this masters degree, grades have been a validation and a driving force to go beyond what I thought I could do to launch me into the world of possibilities. Even grades and competition have to be taught, grasped and view from the proper perspective. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if the world of possibilities was not so twisted and skewed by the individual’s personal make-up. That kind of sounds like multiple intelligence theory and education. – Mark West

My two-cents: It’s not surprising at all that little ones will look to their instructors to map out what educational success means. The ability to assess learning is completely dependent on external feedback, because, quite frankly the little learners thinking and assessment capabilities haven’t been finished …er, baking. The other thing is that grades are meant to be an easy way to communicate the value system between the teacher, the learner and the learner’s parents. Once the learner is an adult the need for external gratification should be a very very low part of the assessment structure because the learner should be able to determine internally whether the thing/process/concept has been functionally integrated into the learner’s thinking/process. At a Master’s you should know whether you know something on a far more real, intricate level than most tests or assignments can accomplish. For the most part grades are then meant to quantify the learning for other interested third parties like accreditation boards and future employers. But the grade itself is not a part of learning and cannot hope to really communicate that beyond what the learner should already know inside. It’s like putting a child’s training wheels on a Harley, if you can afford the ride you shouldn’t need the assist.

What you might be getting from grades is what can also be accomplished by being a part of an active learning community, the emotional connection of sharing what is being learned and what has been learned with others.

The truth is that it is all made up and we all chose how we navigate the process and how we make meaning out of our efforts. Grades have their function, but quite often they are the vestigial left-over from an early era and age, and there are better way to accomplish the need for affirmation and participation. A grade is a lousy substitute for a hug from the learning community.

Sources:
http://web.me.com/markwest58/Site_14/Blog/Entries/2010/7/1_Wk_1_Art_of_Possibilitiy___ch_1-3.html

Rhythm game inches ever closer to ruining the game by making all your hours of playing result in the practical skill of actually learning how to play the musical instruments… First they made fans look silly playing miniature plastic instruments and now all of this might result in actually learning how to play music. Talk about accidental education.

I appreciate your frustration and confusion at the requested changes. One thing that is “consistent” in academic programs and Action Research in particular, is that they tend to evolve. It can be a frustrating thing, but the overall thrust is to make the program the best it can possibly be, and thus the changes that happen along the way are part of that. In this way AR is very much like the technology we use, what worked 12 months ago might not work so well 12 months later.

So the core of what we are looking for hasn’t change but some of the sign posts might have. We’ve been working very closely with together as a team and these are the things that we are looking for:

1. The Lit Review check list: If you go to Dr. Bedard’s example website (see: http://web.me.com/suebedard/AR/Literature_Review.html), you’ll see the check-list. This is very important info.
2. Does it make sense: Just getting a fresh pair of eyes to read the document has proven to be very important. So we’re looking for missing words, missing sentences, things that might have made sense in your head but don’t quite work in print.
3. APA: In-line references and the resource list
4. Synthesis of Resources: The biggest enemy to a good lit review is when one doesn’t fully understand or synthesize the resources and tries to write a lit review. What results is more like an annotated bib where the lit review writer bounces from author name to quote, author name to quote, author name to quote, etc. What we’re looking for is for the author to have a grasp of the lit., so that the writer can act like a talk show host, bring in two or three sources, ask them questions about their work, where their work overlaps, where they disagree with each other and where there are gaps. The talk-show host (lit review writer) never shares his/her opinion, but lets the guests (sources) do all the talking. When they’ve shared their piece, the host brings on a few more guests until the spectrum of the subject has been covered. The host guides the conversation and blends all of the voices, whether they agree or disagree with each other and never shares his opinion or makes his voice louder than theirs. Of course, being a good host, he began the session with a brief intro, no opinion, just the main question at hand. Then when all the guests have spoken, he concludes with a brief summary, again, no opinion on the part of the host. That’s what we’re looking for

Please take advantage of Dr. Bedard’s website, http://web.me.com/suebedard/AR/Literature_Review.html.

Lit Reviews are too complicated to keep it all in your head and being one of the more “academic” things that we do, there’s always a need for re-editing. It’s just the nature of the process.

We want you to be successful and for your work to stand up to the scrutiny of any program in the nation. So we’re going to look at student work that is intended to represent a year’s worth of work with a fine-tooth comb. It’s a lot of work for all of us, but in the end it makes for much better results and speaks to those who under-estimate the value of online education. Hang in there, remember Rule #6, roll with the changes and you’ll be so happy with your work in the end. It’s not that your work is not good enough, we just want it to sing with all the passion that you’ve already invested in it. Hope that this helps. jbb

Joe Bustillos | Course Director
Media Asset Creation – EMDTMS | Full Sail University

The segment featured a shorter version of the video and a little Q&A between Winfrey, Gabriel, Bergh and the students, and ended with Oprah announcing that Target Stores had been enlisted to help upgrade Ocoee’s library. Below is the original video and beneath that several stills of the 1,285 that I shot during the video shoot.

Hard to imagine that an idea shared last Fall in a downtown Orlando restaurant has resulted in an inspirational video that’ll be a life-long memory for the 1,700 students who participated and now has become part of the national conversation on the importance of reading.

image by joe bustillos

image by joe bustillos

image by joe bustillos

image by joe bustillos

image by joe bustillos

image by joe bustillos

sources:
all images by Joe Bustillos.

Here’s a bonus outtake of Dr. Siegel wanting to join in as we were setting up the interview:

Post-Mortem: Educatium only lasted another two episodes which you can find here:

Sources:

Nick Briscoe’s YouTube Videos

"May I axe you a question?" Astro's Got an Axe! by tohoscope

Bob is still looking for his A

Grades in middle school are controversial, especially now that students earn credits to be promoted to the next grade level. Ask a teacher at my school to “give an ‘A’” and their response is likely to be one of confusion, disbelief, laughter, or even anger. Administrators will tell you that grades should be used to measure student success and communicate progress. Unfortunately, many teachers use grades to communicate a very bad message and focus on “principle.” “Its the principle of the matter,” exclaims a colleague. “If you give an ‘A’ to a student who does nothing in your class, what kind of message are you sending the kid who works their butt off?”

So it goes back to measure and comparison (see chapter 2). Giving an A is not about allowing students a free ride and telling hard working students that it is all for nothing. Rather, it is eliminating the “anticipation of failure” and allowing the class to focus on what is more important; learning. It’s all about placing everyone on a level playing field (pardon the competitive sports analogy) and saying, “you already have the grade, what’s next?” It’s likely that the response will involve a feeling of relief and willingness to explore.

Ashley’s always reaching for an ‘A.’

However, I think the next step of giving an ‘A’ is just as important as giving the ‘A’ itself. Teachers who feel that giving an ‘A’ would eliminate student accountability will like this step the most. Requiring that students predict how they have earned the A before they have actually received it, helps them develop goals and builds intrinsic motivation. It also helps them see the possibility of being successful, something many have given up on.

Interested in seeing how I felt about this in October, click here. – Noel Nehrig

And my erudite response:

Grades are a bit like religion. There may have been a point at some time but it’s gotten lost in all of the noise and people are very scared to consider what to do if grades/religion had never existed. In the classroom, has the point of all the effort gotten lost to pursuing a grade? I mean, just like religion, isn’t all of this effort suppose to amount to something intrinsic, some good that goes beyond measure?

Grades are institution solution to communicating student progress and/or position in the A-to-F continuum within the classroom. There the measure, not the point. But i’ve seen instructors at all level quibble looking to seal up any possible loophole that a student might use to game the grading system. At best a grade is an approximation that may or may not be related to student progress fulfilling course requirements. In the end, it’s what we carry in our heads and hearts that matters more than this imperfect approximation. Funny how only those who excel and those who feel besmirched care so much about grades. What’s up with that?

Sources:
Wk 1 Reading- “A” is for Ax Murderer by Noel Nehrig. http://web.me.com/noelnehrig/The_Blog_Prince_for_EMDTMS_MAC/2010_MAC_OCD_Wk1/Entries/2010/2/6_Wk_1_Reading-_%E2%80%9CA%E2%80%9D_is_for_Ax_Murderer.html retrieved on 2/9/2010

Astro’s Got an Axe! by tohoscope. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tohoscope/182444838/ retrieved on 2/9/2010

Stone mason by sk8geek. http://www.flickr.com/photos/sk8geek/3917647300/ retrieved on 2/9/2010

Pretty Princess Picking Her Nose by Pink Sherbet Photography. http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/3295969599/ retrieved on 2/9/2010