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.

“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

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

Digication Revisited

In between large-scale enterprise level learning management systems imposed upon educators and roll-your-own systems like moodle are many smaller online options such as Digication (http://digication.com/). I heard about Digication from an interview of one of the founders, Jeffrey Yan, on Leo Laporte’s “Inside the Net“ podcast. Digication’s founders recognized the need for something more than just another place to post content, something that would cater to educators’ special needs that aren’t being addressed by overly-generalized web-portals, and at the same time be as simple to manage as an email account. Following is a Behind-the-Scenes tour of Digication and the “Inside the Net” interview of Digication founder, Jeffrey Yan (NOTE: the interview is a bit long…). Please review these items before our wimba session.

Inside the Net 35: Digication (http://www.twit.tv/itn35)

Click here to play episode in separate window: Inside the Net 35: Digication

One of the things that attracted me to Digication was that it had all of the features of a full CMS but didn’t require that I code it myself or try to get the assistance/permission from my district IT. Only limitation for the free account was that there couldn’t be more than 1,000 users at my school. I’ve written about my experiences with Digication a few times on my blog:
* Digication Gets My Vote
* Classroom Website on Digication

* Utudu & You: You should be well into creating your Udutu course/unit. Make sure that you make your way through the Udutu tutorials at http://udutu.com/tutorials.html. Please come to our Wimba session ready to share your progress, frustrations and victories. Remember, you want to have your Udutu course set-up quickly enough so that your fellow students have time to visit and comment on your Udutu course (during week 4). The following examples of Udutu units are offered as an inspiration and encouragement (the first one was created by the President of Udutu!). Enjoy:

All About Web 2.0 and Udutu Genesis by Roger Mundell

Introduction to 20th Century Art by Liz Perry

Introduction to Technology Accessibility by Emily Wray

Sources:

* featured image: Study by hermes. http://www.flickr.com/photos/hermes-/421203877/ retrieved on 12/9/2009

* audio podcast: Inside the Net 35: Digication by Leo Laporte and Megan Morrone with Guest: Jeffrey Yan of Digication. http://www.twit.tv/itn35 retrieved on 12/7/2009

* videos: LMO Moments: Behind the Scenes Tour: Digication by Joe Bustillos – emdt/FSO. http://www.viddler.com/explore/joebeebee/videos/22/ retrieved on 12/7/2009

* Udutu units: All About Web 2.0 and Udutu Genesis by Roger Mundell. http://publish.myudutu.com/published/launch/1612/Course15573/Launch.html?redirect=true retrieved on 12/7/2009

* Udutu units: Introduction to 20th Century Art by Liz Perry. http://publish.myudutu.com/published/launch/12441/Course21598/Launch.html?redirect=true retrieved on 12/7/2009

* Udutu units: Introduction to Technology Accessibility by Emily Wray. http://lms.myudutu.com/LMSGadget/courses/lms/12244/Course21696/881/v2009_8_24_18_23_39/course/Course21696.html?redirect=true retrieved on 12/7/2009

:: Description
You will read the Art of Possibility chapters 10 -12 and post one entry (or more) into your blog.

:: Rationale

pacbell by joe bustillos

Sometimes the road we take in the Universe of Possibility leads us in unexpected directions and to unimagined destinations. I took a summer job with Pacific Bell in California. That the company was called Pacific Bell might tell you how long ago that was. I met an energetic manager who shared with me that the secret to avoiding job boredom was to never stay in one job position for too long. He estimated that 18-months was usually more than enough time to get to know all one needs to know and then move on. He was an unusual entrepreneurial sprirt in a company that was much more well known for it’s “lifers” not making any waves and just putting in the time needed to get to retirement. I wasn’t as entrepreneurial as the manager but I knew, much to my family’s frustration, that there was something more for me to do. After finishing a second bachelor’s degree and nearing the end of my teacher credential program, Pacific Bell decided that it was time to let some people go. Normally that would have been a horrible thing, but for me the timing was perfect and I started my career as a public school teacher a few months after letting go of my 15-year “summer job” with the phone company.
Ah, but the story continues from there. Truth be told, being a teacher was somewhat akin to being a phone company drone in that the highest form of praise tended to be that one always showed up for work on time and never did anything that made work for others. Yeah, I somehow ended up in another world of “lifers.” Of course, I didn’t know any better so I kept doing things like teaching my students video journalism to help with their literacy and brought computers from home into my classroom. I guess I became a bit more entrepreneurial because I’d get involved in creating some new tech/ed/media program on campus, we’d have great success and then after a couple of years the funding would go away and I’d find myself working for another school/district, bringing tech/media to the natives. While getting a master’s degree and time spent working on a doctorate I continued the “create a tech program/find success/lose funding/change jobs” cycle three times. Alas, the doctorate program ran aground (twice), but I was lucky enough to work with Dr. Ludgate and somehow found a home on the opposite end of the country working for Full Sail. I am not the poster child for the Art of Possibility. But I am kind of stubborn as far as expecting a lot from myself because I’ve already been given so much. And if I can influence someone to not settle for the status quo, to push the technology, to enable their students, well then, that’s a damn good day.

The following video features someone who found amazing success, in many ways, through equally amazing failures. Having witnessed three of his incredible keynote speeches, this is not one of his better speeches. But the message is all the more real given the speech’s lack of polish. Enjoy.

:: Resources

The Practices
This books is less of a “study” book, where you try to analyze every sentence and paragraph and more a book that you want to move through and try to focus on the over-arching concepts presented. At the end of each chapter are some questions that form the “practices” part of the book. Use the questions to prompt your book notes that you will post in your blog. Feel free to answer the following study questions, or comment on the practices at the end of each chapter, or write about whatever moves you most (that’s directly related to the reading). Your choice.

Chapter 10. Being the Board: It’s not them. It’s not the circumstances. It’s me. It’s my choices. Now what do I do?

Chapter 11. Creating Frameworks for Possibility: How do I take this flash of insight and make it into daily thing? And how do I share this with others?

Chapter 12. Telling the WE Story: I told you it wasn’t about you. Have you been able to tap into the power of combining your expertise and passions with someone equally gifted? Have you had the pleasure of lifting a teammate, student, stranger up enabling them to realize their dreams and exceed anything that you could have imagined?

Coda: Now what do we do?

Sources:
Image: Pop!Tech 2008 – Benjamin Zander by Pop!Tech, http://www.flickr.com/photos/poptech2006/2968249798/ retrieved on 11/12/2009
image: pacbell01.jpg by Joe Bustillos, http://joebustillos.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/pacbell01.jpg retrieved on 11/12/2009
image: jbb & zander by Joe Bustillos, http://web.me.com/edm613/media/jbbnbzander.jpg retrieved on 11/12/2009
YouTube: Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005 posted by peestandingup, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA, retrieved on 11/12/2009.

An open letter to my emdt co-workers, co-conspirators & creativity enablers,

On one level or another I’ve been teaching communication and writing since I took my first teaching assignment 15-years ago. One thing that I learned right away was that it seemed to be a big function of the education system to take the eagerness of our little learners to share their every creation and over time crush it down to nothing, such that every fourth grader knows that no one wants hear what they have to say and even less what they think. The smart ones, in this system, are the ones who learn to speak and write in the language of their teachers, and that it’s critically important to not make any mistakes in spelling or grammar. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the ones who might suffer the most from this fear of writing are the ones who are part of the system that enforces this approach to writing, our masters students. But what they may not know, which I learned from my second-language 6th graders, is that they’ll never get any better at writing without working at it on an ongoing basis and that requires that I release them from the system that says that they can only write about things that the teacher cares about and only in the style set by the teacher. You have to work against a lifetime of “correction” and just get them to write before you can help them to write “better.”

As we begin to make blogging a bigger part of our process, please consider the learning process and that putting thoughts down in writing for others to read takes something more than can be expressed in a check-list (though a check-list can be very helpful in the beginning). What prompted this concern is the following exchange between two of my current students about having to do a blog in my course:

edm613 student blog entry:
“I must admit, I disliked blogging in the last class in which it was a requirement. I am really not sure why- I like to write- but it just never gelled for me. I did, however, revisit the idea of blogging after losing my job at the end of the last school year. I thought I would chronicle the ups and downs of my lack of job, talk about the new and exciting things I would encounter and boast about my new accomplishments. I would fill the pages with salsa lessons, daily musings and funny anecdotes. I think I actually managed to write a paragraph once or twice and it consisted of me complaining and moaning about emotional drudgery. I have a difficult enough time sounding interesting in one line on Twitter- I couldn’t possibly blog about my life- or lack there of.

“So here we go again.

“I decided not to re-purpose my last blog but start a new one. It will be chock full of fresh and new ideas, brilliant insight and astute observations. Words will flow from my mind, through my fingers and dance onto the page. I will be clever and captivating. What does this have to do with anything in class? Nothing, but every blog has to start somewhere. Welcome.”

Second students comment:
“I agree with you about blogging in our last class. The requirements were very limiting and seemed to hold me back. The blog became a chore and I dreaded each and every post for fear that I wouldn’t get a good grade or I would make some simple mistake and have to redo everything. I am very excited to get to share with everyone and express my thoughts more freely again. I like that you have brought a great sense of positivity into your new blog. I like your new point of view…you think you can assist me in bringing back my light?”

Standards of excellence and creativity will never be found where one doesn’t have the freedom to make a thousand mistakes first. I should know. jbb

Sources:
image: keyboard – clipart.com/jupiter graphics
thanks to jolene t. & joann s. for your thoughts and comments on blogging and giving it “one more try.”

Me and Sparky before the End - photo by Joe Bustillos (cc) 2009

My proposed consultancy was to help an independent folk artist, Neva, with her website, to take her web-presence to the next level and leverage the tools out there for many many others to discover her music and great onstage presence. Sparky has known me for a long time, going back to getting my masters degree at Pepperdine in 2002, so to him it probably looked like Joe was just doing another web project and not stretching himself all that much. Though he would never say this directly, he was asking me what makes me think that I deserve to be part of their “doctorate club,” what do I bring to the table that might permit me to add “Ed.D” to the end of my name?

Kirk: Captain of the Enterprise, huh?
Picard: That’s right.
Kirk: Close to retirement?
Picard: I’m not planning on it.
Kirk: Well let me tell you something. Don’t! Don’t let them promote you. Don’t let them transfer you. Don’t let them do *anything* that takes you off the bridge of that ship, because while you’re there… you can make a difference. – Star Trek: Generations (1994)

I had a friend who became my friend after he beat me, getting the job that I wanted as technology coordinator for the school district we both worked in. He was the much better choice for the job. I’d go to his office every once in a while and he’d be required in a hundred places at once and after the dust settled, he’d ask what I was working on in my lab. He’d listen carefully and then say how much he missed crawling under tables, connecting CAT-5 cables, setting up servers and making the hardware and software work. I don’t doubt that there were days that he’d easily give up the suit and tie for the cable-ties and dust-bunnies, but he did so much good setting the policies, practices and standards that enabled the school site tech-coordinators to be education- and student-centric, to drive the technology to do what the vendor promised in pursuit of delivering the best educational experience. I was told that he was a pretty damn good teacher in the computer lab. But the circle of his influence reached so many more students when he left the classroom and started enabling teachers and tech-coordinators to do their best. That’s what I wanted for myself when I began the doctorate program five years ago, to take the good that I’d learned with my classroom of students and enable other teachers to give the same opportunities and learning experiences to their students.

When I began the doctorate program I was a computer lab teacher working at a K-5 elementary school, seeing about 600 students per week, working on everything from basic keyboarding, to teaching PowerPoint to first graders, Excel to second graders and HyperStudio to everyone else. Beginning the second year of the doctorate program I took a job teaching print media/technology and math to sixth, seventh and eighth graders at the middle school level. The transition wasn’t particularly smooth and I ended up taking a leave of absence from Pepperdine after the winter term in order to adjust to my new assignment. Before taking the middle school job I had applied for the same tech coordinator job that I’d lost out to my friend, who was being kicked upstairs to an assistant superintendent job. It was another “no,” and I knew that I lacked secondary ed experience, so that was one thing that was in the back of my mind when I took the middle school job. At the end of three years teaching at the middle school level I could say that I was pretty good at what I did but I was still working on a level that wasn’t really reaching much beyond the walls of my classroom. Fortunately, the opportunity presented itself to break free from my former classroom’s walls and teach online at the masters level for Full Sail University.

Stickam screenshot by Joe Bustillos (cc) 2009

While not as influential on a policy level as a district tech coordinator might be, I was influencing a new group of teachers every month, making a difference in their professional lives, helping them develop new tech and media skills and enabling them to deliver a better educational experience to their students. Thus, working at Full Sail has definitely helped me realize part of the dream to be an influencer on a much bigger level than my previous classroom had afforded to me. And while there are monetary benefits that would come from having the doctorate, the job is not depended on adding three letters to the end of my name.

What still lacks, though, was something that I knew when I set about to get my masters degree. At the time I was teaching video journalism to fifth and sixth graders as part of a Magnet school program that I had helped to develop, but I knew that my position was dependent on the whim and choices made by people further up the chain of command. And sure enough, at the end of the grant I was “encouraged” to find another assignment and ended up at the K-5 computer lab, switching districts. Then four years later it happened again (funding changed and my job was eliminated) and that’s when I switched to the middle school job. The masters degree was supposed to help me keep my tech position and it did help me keep my middle school job because I didn’t have a single-subject credential or a computer science undergraduate degree. But I still was working at a level where if someone up the chain sneezed, I caught the cold. These days there are no teaching jobs with 100% security, but I think what I’m really driving at is working on things that are much more fundamental to teaching and technology than ensuring a cushy teaching position.

The research that I was beginning to work on, before my disenrollment from Pepperdine, was what impact might happen if a public school district were to switch from printed textbooks to e-textbooks delivered on small devices like iTouches and Kindles. I wasn’t thinking in terms of literacy improvement but on bottom-line TCO level and the possible shift away from fixed, one-size-fits-all curriculum to dynamic, interactive, current, classroom-specific curriculum where the expertise of the classroom educator and familiarity with specific class’ strengths and need might be drawn into the process of what e-textbooks are used in the classroom. I was also thinking about the destabilizing factor this shift might have with the powerful textbook lobby as far as reducing their part of the budget which might also reduce their influence on the politicians who determine which curriculum to follow. Then, of course, the governator announced his proposal to go computer-based e-textbooks to save the California millions of dollars. I guess I was on the right track.

So, if I were to continue this research than the whole state of California might become the testbed. The point is that as I was watching the deployment of this technology into the general public over a year and a half ago and I could see how it would benefit educational users in terms of TCO and, more importantly, in terms of shifting towards a much more flexible system for delivering educational content.

Raising my sights from this particular example to the larger picture of my life’s mission, which is what I think Sparky was trying to guide me toward, I have to lock on to the common threads that I have seen since my masters program days:

• The power of online technology to enable deep, long lasting, life changing communities of practice,
• The need to balance measurable learning growth with the fact that education is at it’s heart a human endeavor, and while we humans are forever capable of exceeding anyone’s expectations, we do not do so on anyone’s set schedule or according to anyone’s predetermined quotas,
• After 30-years in the classroom the problems with Technology are not about the need for more teacher training or even better technological tools. The problem is a persistent “school” culture that is still run on the competitive factory manager model where little unformed minds come in one door and little learners walk out the other, having all had the same coat of paint and varnish applied to their outsides.
• The world of technology is changing and moving forward at a pace that the traditional world of education cannot hope to keep up . But we have to find meaningful ways to keep up, which means we might have to abandon fixed mindsets about education and the classroom and teaching that were from a time when a high school graduate could enter the job market and build a lifelong career with one company.

What this means to me is that I see my position at Full Sail as a foundation to enable my graduate students to mine the depths of community, to change their learning environments one student and one classroom at a time, to reflect the best that we can accomplish by efficiently using technology and media in our instruction and interaction with our students, and to learn from every success and every set-back. This also means that I must dig deeper into my own community of learners and be less of a lurker and more of a participant and agent of change. Too long the writer in me has enjoyed the anonymous vantage of the untraceable voice making sarcastic comments from a hidden perch. And it is too tempting to let myself get distracted in my little cubicle by all of the shiny gadgets being introduced on a regular basis and to favorably compare my lack of progress with those around me who have no calling in their lives. It’s time to occupy the Captain’s chair.

It isn’t about getting a doctorate and then “retiring” on some level. Perhaps that’s part of my previous caution, is that I didn’t want to expend so much energy in the pursuit that I wouldn’t have anything left for the post-doctorate part of my life. I don’t know where I got that notion from but it seems pretty stupid as I commit the thought to words on the screen. Anyway, I don’t come from a family with too many doctoral academics. There are plenty of masters graduates among my siblings and cousins (amazing when one considers that a high school diploma was the terminating degree of almost 100% of my parents’ associates who graduated at all). So I don’t come at this with any sense of expectation beyond acknowledging that I have been one lucky kid who worked to keep his options open to pursue his academic musings. I guess it’s time to be the adult and not the lurker, to do more than guide the next generation, but to have part in changing the paths that they will follow.

I think that drive, the intellect and passion behind it are the keys to my entrance into the hall of academics, the mythic doctorate club. I will not check my ID or my iPhone at the door.

Sources:
images: Me and Sparky and 090723 stickam session by Joe Bustillos (cc) 2009

Quote: “Captain of the Enterprise?” from the movie: Star Trek: Generations, story by Rick Berman, Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111280/quotes retrieved on 7/23/2009

YouTube video: Leading the Nation Into a Digital Textbook Future – Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (Teil 1), posted by http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hPi1hrJxFQ retrieved on 7/23/2009

Then the last week of February, as if I needed a textbook case on Fair Use, I stumbled across an NPR interview of the artist, Shepherd Fairey, who was behind President Obama’s “Hope” poster that rose to iconic status during the election. Seems that the Associated Press was threatening to sue Fairey for the use of the photograph that he used to create his poster. Just before NPR ran the story Fairey decided to beat AP to the punch and sue AP claiming that his use of the photo was covered under Fair Use. To make things even more complicated, the photographer, Mannie Garcia, is suing AP claiming that he was a freelancer and not an AP employee when he shot the disputed photo and therefore he is entitled to compensation from this litigation. Let’s say it together: Fair Use is not a right but a defensible position. Again, Fair Use is not a right but a defensible position.

I asked photographer and TWiT contributer, Scott Bourne, his take on the case (via Twitter) and he said, “I think the artist stole the photo and his fair use claim will end up costing him treble damages. All depends on whether AP owns pic.”

When NPR’s Terry Gross asked the photographer of the Obama image, Mannie Garcia, his take on Fairey using his photograph he said, “[It's] crucial for people to understand, simply because it’s on the Internet doesn’t mean that it’s free for the taking, and that just because you can take it, means that it belongs to you.”

A cursory survey of opinions online from the likes of Milton Glaser on BoingBoing, Mark Vallen on Art-for-Change, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and Chal Pivik on the Los Angeles METBlogs, seems to show that the more the pundit knows about the actual steps or changes to the photo that Fairey made to create the poster the more likely the writer will come down on the side of Fairey’s Fair Use claim. Finally, NPR did an excellent job covering all of the angles of the story, finishing up with a discussion with law professor Greg Lastowka on the case and Fair Use. Click the player below for the complete NPR recording.

NPR: Fresh Air: Shepard Fairey: Inspiration Or Infringement?

Los Angeles Times Video: Hope: Shepard Fairey and Barack Obama

Postscript: Had my research on this story ended with the NPR piece I would have been left with a different image of Shepherd Fairey than the one I gained via a series of videos that were created long before Obama campaign, when Fairey’s main claim to fame was his “Andre the Giant: Obey!” world-wide sticker/poster/street art project. Fifteen-plus arrests later for “street art” activities and it’s little wonder that he’d be a media darling while at the same time being in trouble for taking someone’s else’s photograph and not thinking twice about using it to make the Obama: Hope image. When he says, “Icon” for the G4 series of the same name, implying his own status in the art/street culture world, I’m put off by the arrogance and willingness to play both sides of the media. When all of this plays out the title of his next video might be, “Shepherd Fairey: Oops.”

Sources:
Obama photo: Mannie Garcia (AP)/Obama image: Shepherd Fairey, retrieved from http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/09/milton-glaser-weighs.html on 04/09/2009

Shepard Fairey: Inspiration Or Infringement? NPR Fresh Air interview, retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101182453 on 02/27/2009

Hope: Shepard Fairey and Barack Obama – Los Angeles Time interview/video retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_EOzZ9iaJQ&NR=1 on 04/07/2009

ICONS: Shepard Fairey, YouTube video retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNv-9IOBZZo on 04/07/2009

So after one of our class sessions, one of my more media savvy students made the following comment in his blog:

Copyright is such a touchy subject, it’s getting crazier and crazier, even for students, to try to use resources. It seems like it’s going to get to a point where you have to have a law degree just to understand when and where you can use an image or reference someone else’s works. One solution is to always create your own work and I’m going to try to do that more often, so that I really don’t have to rely on others. But it [the session] really showed us that there are quite a difference of nuances that we really need to be aware of and really pay attention to, especially in our work now (Quinto M.)

I’ve had a number of students who are band, drama or media teachers who have to pay rather large fees out of increasingly non-existent budgets so that they can do their job and teach the next generation of musicians and artists their craft. The more I thought about it and Quinto’s comment about not relying on others the more I got pissed off that this whole copyright thing is backwards. I added the following comment to Quinto’s blog:

This is one of those subjects that one can go on and on and on about. The more that I think about it the more that I’m convinced that there needs to be a special “educational” license to use media because the first step that any artist makes, going back all the way probably to the cave paintings in Lascaux, is to carefully copy the techniques and works of the masters. Every artist owes their livelihood, if they are fortunate enough to make a livelihood to some teacher who taught them their craft. How dare the artists demand payment from the teachers! There would be no artist collecting a fee if it weren’t for the teacher who taught him in the first place!

Sources:
clipart: Task Force Clip Art (c) 1995
image: Quinto Martin 2009
http://web.me.com/tatt2q/Q_Blog/Blog_Week2/Entries/2009/3/11_Copyright_Schooling.html

Careful analysis of click-tracking data is showing that only around 50% of the students are actually watching the media elements integrated into the courses. We are trying to understand the reasons why students aren’t watching the media. Sometimes, it is clear that they are just not seeing the value in the media pieces. And admittedly, not all the media is uniformly excellent. However, we are also finding that our online students are incredibly task-focused. They do exactly what they need to do to complete the assignments and nothing more. As an online student myself, I guess I understand that one! (d. lungren)

My words of wisdom to this student:
Some very valuable analysis here. The quality level and relevance to subject being taught, or even just the perceived level of importance of the media really makes a difference. It’s that careful incorporation of content and delivery methods that can get easily lost in the pursuit of having all kinds of “shiny things” on one’s educational website. A lot of folks on the top of the institutional food-chain often confuse what works well for student learning versus what looks good in the PR video clip. Hell, look at any educational institution that presents itself as promoting “technology” and the first thing they’ll show you is there computer lab and shiny boxes. But ask them to show you how the tech is used across the curriculum and your likely to run into institutional double speak. In fact… I did a whole video on just this subject:

Again, thanks for the inspiration. Great job. jbb

Sources:

http://web.me.com/dlungren/Site_5/Musings/Entries/2009/2/14_thoughts_on_media_and_online_learning.html#

FS Ad

Went looking for information about local Macintosh user groups and thought to begin by visiting the website of one of my favorite mac-macs, Lesa Snyder King. She had several user groups listed but none within striking distance from my domicile. Damn. So while I cruising about the website looking for info I stumble upon the ad list here to the right. Yeah. My school Full Sail has an ad on Lesa’s site. I was jazzed and jealous. It was in her Google ad-sense so there’s no “making it happen.” Anyway, it felt like seein’ a friend on TV. You point, make a funny sound and then move on when no one thinks it’s as cool as you do. Oh well, I guess I’m too easily amused. [sigh]

Following the initial announcement the crew at CNET’s Buzz-Out-Loud podcast noted that it was very Apple-like in it’s form, verbiage and “message” control. The promo video/commercial (above) that I saw on Engadget certainly reminded me of an Apple ad. Question is whether Amazon is going to make the same Apple made 25 years ago when they assumed that everyone would pay extra for a revolutionary device (in Apple’s case the original Macintosh). That mistake almost spelled the end of Apple and we would have missed out on all of the revolutionary things Apple has done since then. As an educator and technologist I see a potential with the Kindle that we cannot afford to miss. And it goes way past the Kindle being a shiny new technology thing.

When I first came to Full Sail University I heard about a program director who asked his students if they had a choice would they prefer to get their texts as books or as electronic books on a small e-book device like the Sony e-Reader or the Amazon Kindle. To his surprise the students, pretty much to a person, choose plain old fashion books over the e-books. In my previous job teaching in a traditional environment, I wouldn’t have been too surprised at the choice of paper books over little electronic devices, but at a place as advanced as Full Sail I would have expected a different answer. Then again, as usability experts have been saying for some time (and I’ve been writing about), people don’t read from computer screens, they scan and skim but don’t read long passages. And in the public’s mind, whether it’s a 17-inch LCD or a e-Book’s “electronic paper,” they seem to perceive the experience to be the same. Even more than the initial expense of the device, many have said that they can’t imagine curling up with an Amazon Kindle like they would with their favorite book. I can’t argue with that. But as someone who loves having bookshelves filled with hundreds of books, there is something wasteful about large institutions, such as government agencies, universities and school districts, continuing to deliver content in such inefficient ways.

Let’s take my former employer, Long Beach Unified School District, a Southern California K-12 district with 93 schools and over 90,000 students, I’ve seen one of the giant warehouses used for district publications and textbook storage and transportation. This was a very large operation requiring a lot of space, trucks and manpower. I have to wonder, what would be the cost differential between managing, distributing and maintaining one small device per student versus housing, delivering, managing, and repairing four to seven textbooks per student? I don’t have the budget figures for how much it costs LBUSD for the distribution center property that I saw, many acres of valuable Southern California real estate, or how much it must cost to maintain a fleet of trucks and the manpower to keep everything running, but I’m willing to guess that even at retail prices the $360 Kindle2 would shave a significant chunk off the cost of getting text to students. So why is no one considering this particular option?

Let’s consider who would lose out if school districts like LBUSD were to switch from shuffling around mega-tons of dead trees to providing their students with one small electronic device? Well, most of the warehouse employees and truck drivers would probably be looking for different employment opportunities, but I don’t sense that they have the political clout to keep something like this from happening. No, but if the whole cost structure of creating and providing students with textbooks were to collapse the ones likely to complain the most would probably be the politically powerful textbook publishers. In California alone I imagine that billions of dollars of business is being conducted by textbook publishers who in turn are more than a little happy to support the political agencies assigned to regulate the textbook trade. Now imagine what would happen if the whole physical infrastructure of getting educational content to students was to go away. How would the publishers maintain their profit margins, er, I mean justify their costs? Textbook authors work for nothing and the advisory committees for the publishers and the school districts are generally volunteer. If the fiction market is any indication, where the Kindle version tends to be one-third to one-fourth the hard cover cost, the move to something like the Kindle would be pretty much like how a giant rock falling from the sky wiped out the dinosaurs. It would change everything.

Going beyond the political stranglehold textbook publishers have on curriculum, imagine how much more interactive and timely (and correct!) science texts could be, for example? Course design and implementation would go from a top-down roll out to be a collaborative process with the classroom teacher, curriculum writers, and academic subject experts having meaningful roles. Because the expense of updates and error corrections would be wiped out, the ongoing nature of what it means to study a particular academic discipline would actually be reflected in the text. Instead of an impersonal, “fixed” text, edited (to death) by committee, the passion of the classroom teacher for the subject and the text book writer could be more readily communicated in the text. I know it’s heresy, but classroom teachers would actually be able to pick the texts that would work best with their students and not be restricted by some agreement made by some agency who knows nothing about her students or their learning needs. It would change everything. The dinosaurs aren’t going to like it, but we can’t afford to let ‘em continue to keep us tied down.

Source: About Long Beach Unified School District, retrieved 02-27-2009, http://www.lbschools.net/District/

Originally uploaded by fensterbme

It was Valentine’s weekend for some. For me it was just another weekend spent grading student blogs. But after reading an article in the UK’s Telegraph online newspaper titled, “Valentine’s Day: Technology is killing romance,” one of my students wrote a blog entry weighing the article’s premise that, because of technology, people don’t write love poems or letters to each other anymore. She said that a survey of over two-thousand people revealed that 62% had never sent a love letter (via the postal service). At the same time most everyone said that they had sent a text-message love note. My student shrugged that even though a text message isn’t anywhere as good as a real love letter, a text message is better than nothing. I’ve heard this one before: if it’s not on paper, written by hand, it’s just not as real. I don’t mean to be cruel or even crude, but I think that’s just bullshit.

Well, I was a little gentler when I began my response:

I’m curious, what is it in an electronic Valentine’s message that make is not “expressing yourself with your own thoughts”? I’ve been known to use every communication means at my disposal to let my beloved know that I was thinking of her. From 140 character text messages, to “Hello” IMs, to overly long voice-messages, to rambling emails, I found the “electronic” experience to have a certain level of “presence” that I didn’t experience before. Granted I might have over-used said technologies.. a bit… resulting in … let’s just say that my options are very flexible these days. But that’s not because of technology, that’s because some folks just don’t know how to put one word after another in a coherent (and passionate) manner. What’s that old saying about a good painter never blaming his tools…

long-haired writer

On a completely different note I was just told by a potential “match” that my e-Harmony profile photo was “a little scary.” WTF? It makes one second guess. The photo is dark and pencil-sketchy. Does that translate into dangerous and scary? I haven’t taken an official teacher-photo in several years so I’ve been using Photo-booth pix. Good thing I didn’t use any of the fun-house effects. I really shouldn’t let these things bother me, but I do wonder at how often I’ve been bumped off because of some misperception beginning with my profile photo. Then again, someone unable to appreciate something a little artsy probably isn’t going to work well with my continual self-assessment and re-interpretations of my self. Damn. Of course, having posted this photo of myself for the millionth time, I probably come off as totally self-obsessed and self-absorbed. I switched my profile photo to a “I voted” shot, which will probably piss off someone because it’s “political.” sigh.

Source: Adams, J. (2009, February 9). Valentine’s Day: Technology ‘is killing romance’. Telegraph. Retrieved http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/4568243/Valentines-Day-Technology-is-killing-romance.html

photo by B Buffington

I loved Benjamin Zander’s analogy of the conductor and orchestra. Too often educators forget that we are not there to fill there little brains with information all day long. This is where the NCLB act has brought us, though. His analogy was a reminder to me that I am not a teacher but a facilitator to great things. I have to create a safe platform for students to take risks and increase their interests and abilities… The way I see it, there is not enough freedom and fun in public schools now-a-days. For goodness sake, they even took away recess! (B. B.)

I was understandably horrified: What?! No recess?! Even us office drones are told to get out of our chairs every 15 to 30 minutes by most productivity experts. How the hell are little bodies supposed to learn cooped up like factory chickens in their little learning pens. Argh.

I try not to allow Zander’s conceptualism bother me–it goads me like a poker when he says “language is replete with a variety of ‘things’ that have no existence in time and space but seem as real to us as anything we own–’justice’ for instance….” … If everyone has their own personal framework of possibility, I fear we’ll lose the intimacy of sharing a common framework. Take the Hubble photograph above. The beauty of the Pleiades Cluster is not a construct of my mind–its beauty is there to be discovered by any who would attend to it. The community of astronomers who photograph it share a common beauty between them–something bigger than any one’s construct. Isn’t this what makes possibility appealing? What possibilities are worth seeking and having in my life? R. Swindoll

My response: Wonderful observations and pondering questions. I find it interesting that you comment about trying to not let Zanders conceptualizations bother you and then you spend the rest of the post wrestling with them. You are touching on the universal question between perception and empirical reality. Without going too much into what seems like a “dancing on the head of a pin” question, I believe that it’s foolish to think that there is no external reality. Thus the miracle is that we do seem to share in a common framework of understanding despite the fact that our consciousness is trapped in the “black box” of our individual skulls dependent on imperfect sensory organs to perceive and communicate with this seemingly infinite external universe.

And perhaps the universe was indeed laughing at me, that I would attempt to answer the student’s pondering because, after I had drafted what I thought was a perfectly crafted comment I inadvertently clicked a button on the screen and sent all of those wonderful words straight to hexadecimal oblivion. No small about of screaming or laughing at the absurdity would bring those perfectly positioned words back. Thus the above rendition is the best that I could bring back from a brain that wasn’t very happy with it’s fingers. Imperfect sensory organs indeed.

Music: Goodbye by Kevin Shields from the Lost In Translation – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack