Another meme is doing the rounds of the edublogosphere at the moment, called the Passion Quilt meme.

I was tagged to contribute by Woody Delauer, a teacher from Maryland in the US, and asked to keep this meme going. (I think I was tagged by this a few weeks ago by someone else but we were in the middle of moving house at the time so it slipped through the cracks - sorry!)

The Passion Quilt meme works like this…

1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons (or even find one marked as copyright but then write to the owner to ask permission).  You can also make/take your own of course.  This picture should capture the quality that YOU are most passionate for kids to learn.
3. Give your picture a short title.
4. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to the blog entry that tagged you.
5. Include further links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

For me, the thing I am most passionate about is getting students to develop their sense of curiosity about the world.  The idea that I might be able to to stimulate a kid’s sense of curiosity and wonder about the world, to build their sense of needing to know more about how and why the world works the way it does, to provoke their need to ask questions and find the answers… that’s what makes it worth going to work every day.

Curiosity makes the need to teach almost redundant.  Kids who are curious don’t need to be taught - they are too busy learning.  They question, they play, they wonder, they discover. They want to know how things work, and why.  They like to change things that make no sense to them, and in the process they can end up changing the world itself.  Students who are curious about why things are the way they are, and who question things endlessly, are the ones who are most likely to be able to change the future.  These kids don’t need teachers, they need wise guidance.

Yes, my passion is to give my students a sense of curiosity.  I liked the photo by gigglejuice, because I thought it captured that sense of discovery, of reaching out to touch new things, of crossing boundaries.  I’m going to title it, simply, “Discovery”.

So, what’s YOUR passion in education?

To keep the meme going, I’ll tag the following people…

• Helen Otway - http://helenotway.edublogs.org/
• Anna Adam - http://techchicktips.net/
• Elizabeth Helfant - http://helcat.org/wordpress/
• Fred Delventhal - http://blog.discoveryeducation.com/fred_delventhal1/
• Russel Montgomery - http://braindump.edublogs.org/
• Mick Prest - http://mickprest.edublogs.org/

Yes I know that’s 6 people, not 5, but I wanted to balance the guys with the girls…

Over to you!

It’s been quite a week in the educational blogosphere…

A lot of the chatter (or rather, twitter) has been focussed on the sudden forced closure of Al Upton’s classroom blog by his Year 3 students.  The closure was requested by DECS, the South Australian Department of Education and Children’s Services in response to a parent who was concerned about their kid being exposed to the dangers of the Internet.  Al’s kids, well known on the web as the “miniLegends”, have been blogging successfully for the last few years, and were just starting a new project where their blogging was being mentored by other teachers around the world. In theory, it sounds like a great idea… kids with a passion for writing being connected with other educators all over the world willing to help these kids with their writing, offering critique, advice, suggestions, support and generally acting as a volunteer tutoring service at no charge.

Their blogging came to a screeching halt last Friday however, when Al received a cease and desist notice from the Department, who clearly have their heads in a very dark place.  It’s a bit of a long story, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve been part of several very late Skype chats this week with a number of high profile Australian teacher-bloggers who were close to the real story and keen to talk about the situation and what it means for education. Al is being quietly philosophical about the whole thing, but is also quietly annoyed.

The story of why the blog was shut down is well documented elsewhere, so I won’t delve into it in depth here.  Just suffice to say that the South Australian education department has not done a great job of handling the public relations fallout as a result of this.

Here we have a situation of a world class educator willing to lead his students in an authentic, real-world writing task, developing their passion for learning and writing, along the way observing every required protocol for getting the appropriate permissions and authorities from parents, and then finding that the whole shebang can be shut down by one paranoid complaint from someone who clearly doesn’t get it…   Either way, the kids were punished for no good reason, Al was made to endure scrutiny that he ought not have had to, and a great project has been marred.  To get a feel for how the world responded, have a browse through the nearly 200 comments on what currently remains of the MiniLegends blog…

Apparently the big problem was that the miniLegends were going to be in contact with (over the Internet) other adult educators.  The paranoia that surrounds this idea that kids should not have contact with adults like this is, quite frankly, insulting to the adults. It insinuates that adults cannot be trusted, that danger is everywhere, that children should trust nobody.  The psychological mistrust and fear such an attitude engenders far outweighs the real risk.

It’s especially ridiculous because while all this was happening here in Australia, the TED conference was taking place in Monterey, California, where one of the speakers was Dave Eggers.  Eggers presented a talk about an amazing project where he has been connecting school kids with professional writers who volunteer their services for free to help kids with tutoring.  The project, called Once Upon a School, is absolutely awe inspiring and has spread to a number of other states now wanting to develop similar grassroots programs.

What I find so paradoxical, is that while Al Upton is getting shut down here in Australia for wanting to connect his students to willing adults eager to help the kids write better, Dave Eggers is on the other side of the world getting a standing ovation, winning a TED prize, and starting a grassroots movement to help kids by doing more or less the same thing.

It’s a funny old world.

Interesting article from eSchool News…

A delegation led by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) recently toured Scandinavia in search of answers for how students in that region of the world were able to score so high on a recent international test of math and science skills. They found that educators in Finland, Sweden, and Denmark all cited autonomy, project-based learning, and nationwide broadband internet access as keys to their success.

What the CoSN delegation didn’t find in those nations were competitive grading, standardized testing, and top-down accountability—all staples of the American education system.

and this bit…

Unlike in the United States, which has taken the opposite approach, Scandinavian countries have established national curriculum standards but have set fairly broad mandates, letting authority trickle down as close to the classroom as possible. Local school officials have the flexibility to provide education services according to their students’ unique needs and interests, as long as the basic policy framework is followed.

Therefore, teachers are extremely autonomous in their work. So are students. For example, internet-content filtering in the three countries is based largely on a philosophy of student responsibility. Internet filters rarely exist on school computers, other than for protection from viruses or spam. As a school librarian in Copenhagen said, “The students understand that the computers are here for learning.”

Julie Walker, executive director of the American Association of School Librarians, said these countries see students as having “the filter in their heads.”

Walker also noted that while “the U.S. holds teachers accountable for teaching, here they hold the students accountable for learning.”

Not sure what else to add. Great article.

Towards the end of last year I received a request from a teaching colleague about providing a bit of technical assistance for one of her students with a video project. The student, whom I will simply refer to as Joanna, was studying the HSC Extension 2 English course and had set herself a fairly grandiose goal for a movie project. Ext2 English is a very demanding course, and Joanna had elected to create an elaborate video as part of the package of material she was submitting for assessment.

Joanna’s goals for the movie were considerable. She had a number of special effects in mind to help tell the story she wanted to tell, but she had very little actual experience in movie making. Some of the effects she was proposing were very sophisticated, with visions of a very dreamlike sequence and some unusual effects… effects that were far beyond those available in entry level video editing software. She came to me to ask for some advice about the best tools to use and how she could learn to use them, and I quickly worked out that Joanna would not be prepared to compromise or “dumb it down” to make it easier on herself. After a bit of discussion about what she was trying to create I recommended she think about using Sony Vegas. Vegas is a sophisticated non-linear video editing application with a fairly steep learning curve. Joanna took the task very seriously however, and was not daunted by the enormous job in front of her. She obtained a copy of the software, enrolled in a 2 day course in Sony Vegas, watched a couple of training DVDs, and asked me lots of questions. During the project she had numerous technical hurdles to overcome including a couple of major project rebuilds due to lost resource files, not to mention dealing with the logistical nightmare of a final working file of over 30 Gigabytes! After all the tears, sweat and love, the result of her work, a video piece called The Sounds of the Silent, earned her one of the highest marks in the state for the subject and contributed to an outstanding HSC result.

What I find most fascinating about all of this is that Joanna’s desire to produce this video far outweighed her own technical knowledge about how to do it, as well as her teacher’s technical knowledge, and it certainly stretched my own technical knowledge as I tried to assist her through the hard parts of the project. The important lesson from this is that if you want something bad enough then you will figure out how to make it happen. Once you have the “want to” you eventually work out the “how to”.

That’s an important lesson for us as educators. We sometimes feel our students need to know all the information before they can proceed, or that acquiring the facts is the important part of learning. Not always true. Sometimes the acquisition of knowledge or facts is the least important factor in success… the really important factor is something much simpler - just a desire to create, to learn, to express oneself.

Perhaps we should be thinking about how best to create in our students this desire to find out the “how” by igniting their sense of “why”. If we continue to give our students a strong sense of why they need to learn things by giving them real-world tasks that they genuinely care about, the mechanics of how they learn would almost take care of themselves.

One of the new year’s resolutions that Linda and I made for 2008 is to try and be a little kinder to the planet; whether that be to walk and cycle more instead of driving, to buy products that are more environmentally friendly, or to make an effort to generate less waste… even small changes may help the planet. If we can encourage a few others to do the same, it may help even more.

There are plenty of great stories about the Power of One… the effect that one person can have if the ripples from their actions spread far enough to influence others. One of the great Power of One stories is that of Earth Hour.

Earth Day started in Sydney last year with an idea that if we simply turned our lights off for one hour the overall effects could be substantial. Of course, it was a symbolic gesture more than anything else, but on 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour - Earth Hour. During this single hour, the collective effort of turning off the lights reduced Sydney’s energy consumption by 10.2%, which is the equivalent effect of taking 48,000 cars off the road. What started as a grassroots community idea quickly took hold among the corporate and government sectors, proving that a simple idea like turning the power off for an hour can gather enough momentum to make a noticable difference and raise awareness of the problems our planet faces.

In 2008, Sydney wants to spread the Earth Hour concept to the rest of the world, turning a symbolic event into a global movement. In 2008, other cities around the world will join Sydney - Copenhagen, Toronto, Christchurch, Tel Aviv, Chicago, and many others - and at 8pm on March 29 will turn off the lights for an hour.

Although I live here in Sydney, I don’t watch a lot of news so I never heard about Earth Hour last year until it was over. However, if it was being talked about in the blogosphere I probably would have known about it… so this year I want to put it out there, and ask you to pass it on. If you think it sounds like a good idea, tell others about it. Blog about it. Get your own city to do it. Do it yourself. But especially, tell your students about it.

This is a wonderful, simple idea to share with your students. It can make them feel part of a global movement, but more importantly it demonstrates that individuals CAN come up with simple, sharable ideas that make a difference.

Having taught high school for basically all of my teaching career, I’ve just started working with the little kids in a R-12 school. (The R stands for Reception, and is the grade before Kindergarten) It’s great working with the littlies, they are so cute!

I team taught with another teacher today for the Grade 2 computer lesson and although they only did some pretty basic word processing stuff today I was impressed with just how capable some of these young students are with technology. I even had one of the students, a delightful young lady all of about seven years old, solve a password problem that had me, the teacher and the IT Director stumped. She remembered the login name and an arcane 6 character password which had not been used since before the Christmas holidays - about seven weeks ago. Pretty clever I thought. (Don’t even get me started on why our kinder age kids are required to have a strong, secure password that changes every 90 days… they play Kidpix and games for goodness sake!) However, the students all eventually got logged in and spent the lesson doing some stuff in Word.

I’m keen to get the kids doing some more interesting work with some of the Web 2.0 apps, although I need to work with their classroom teachers to figure out exactly what that might be. Small steps to start with… my new school does not have much of a Web 2.0 mindset yet, but it a pleasure to be working with teachers who are really keen to learn and to try new things.  I know we will make good progress.

Eventually, these kids will need to have an online identity though, and usually that means they will need an avatar to represent themselves. As an adult, I usually just use a small photo of myself for an avatar, but I was interested to read a post by Silvia Tolisano over at the Langwitches blog about some of the options she uses for avatar-making with younger students. Obviously there are some really important issues to consider when working with the young students to maintain their privacy and security. First names only. No defining or identifying information. No photos.

In her post, Silvia mentions a rather fun little web app called Building my Wild Self, which enables kids to create a modular avatar out of bits and pieces… head, arms, legs, clothes, eyes, mouth, etc… just pick the parts you like, assemble them together, and it creates a cool looking “mini-me”. I’m sure the kids will have a lot of fun using it and I’m looking forward to getting them to try it out.

I’m especially interested in seeing how intuitive these little kids find the site. My first impression of these very young students is that they are very much at home in a digital environment, and I’m keen to extend upon that by introducing both the teachers and the students to some of the more engaging applications from the Web 2.0 world.

Tags: avatar, safety, kindergarten, infants

Here’s an interesting thought about the nature of communication through conversation…

Michael Wesch is a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, and the creator of several well-watched YouTube videos about the nature of web 2.0. I’m sure most of the edublogosphere has probably seen “The Web is Us/ing Us“, “Information R/Evolution” and “A Vision of Students Today“. All of these videos have done the rounds of the web in a completely viral way, and if you haven’t yet seen them, you should.

In an interview with John Batelle from Searchblog, Wesch was asked about the videos and some of the ideas he was exploring by making them. It’s an interesting read, but I was particularly struck by one of his responses in the comment section at the end of the interview, as he was counter-responding to a long string of blog comments from multiple readers…

“The Web speeds up the process of rebuttal, reply, and revision and calls forth a different approach. The radically collaborative technologies emerging on the Web create the possibility for doing scholarship in the mode of conversation rather than argument, or to transform the argument as war metaphor into something that suggests collaboration rather than combat”

… and this…

“Even now, as I am answering multiple questions with one long comment at the bottom of a blog post, the structure of the medium is in some way affecting how I am responding. On a forum I would address each question individually in separate threads. These seemingly minor differences are important because all human relationships are mediated by communication. If we change the way we communicate, we change human relationships, and since society is ultimately based on human relationships, those seemingly minor differences can have a profound effect on society, especially if they become dominant or very popular modes of communication.
I can’t see into the future, but what gives me hope is that there are now more people than ever capable of creating and contributing to how these communication structures might be built, and even more people capable of contributing to a serious conversation about the implications.”

This seems to be a common theme, this idea of conversation as a means of evolving shared knowledge. Again, I’ll use the phrase “Learning is a Conversation” as I think it sums up this idea that by engaging in an ongoing conversation we eventually start to spot patterns, see the big picture, and construct our own way of thinking about the world.

This is especially important in our school systems, where conversations between teachers and teachers, students and students, and teachers and students may be the only really effective way to evolve the sorts of ideas and knowledge needed for a 21st century education.

We now live in a world which has fundamentally changed. The idea of learning as a finite body of knowledge which can be transferred from the information-haves to the information-have-nots is no longer tenable. Schools cannot continue to be places where learning is simply about remembering facts and definitions. Information is no longer scarce… Google changed all that. The real task of learning is now to effectively engage with ideas, to discuss and debate, learning about them through ongoing conversation. By engaging in learning as a conversation we can start to get real traction from the neverending stream of ideas around us, expanding our thinking in agreement or argument, encouraging our learners to be critical and creative thinkers.

And as we change our thinking through these conversations, perhaps we become capable of changing our world; which is perhaps what schools ought really be about in the first place.

Tags: conversation, michaelwesch, youtube, information

I didn’t write this, but I enjoyed reading it and wanted to share it.  It comes straight from mouth of Seymour Papert, one of the most influential thinkers of our time.  This quote comes from a speech Papert gave, and is worth reading the whole thing.

“School as we’ve known it is based on an assembly-line model. And the assembly line was a great invention when Henry Ford made it. And the school might have been a great invention when it was made, but it is an assembly-line model. You come into school, you’re in the first grade, in the first period of the day. You do what the first chapter of the textbook says. You go to second period, third period, second grade, third grade. It’s an assembly line; at each point some new pieces of knowledge are put in.
Why we did this was because we had only such primitive knowledge management technology as chalk and blackboard–and even printing is inflexible, impersonal. With our new forms of knowledge technology, there is no reason why we should have the assembly-line model. There is no reason why we should segregate people by age, rather than bring together people who share an interest, who share a style of doing things, who can do things in common.
When we break away from our mental blinkers enough to be able to throw off the idea that math means adding fractions and this other stuff that we learned in elementary school–which nobody ever does–we spend all that expensive money, and time, and frustration, and psychological damage for the people who don’t take to it, in order to program our children to do what a $2 calculator could do better.
We will break away from this one day. We will allow people to learn by following the things they believe in with passion and interest. They’ll learn more deeply. No, they won’t all learn the same things, but we don’t need them to learn all the same things. We want them to be diverse. We want them to be able to do different kinds of activities and bring different points of view.
But in order to do this, we have to break away from this idea that by a token presence of technology–which is all that a pencil in every classroom, or a computer in every classroom, or an Internet connection in every classroom, can be.
We have to break away from that, accept the fact that we have to give every child–not just one maybe, maybe several, but at least one–personal computer to be his or her own thing, to be used not to follow a curriculum, but to follow creative, personalized, diverse learning. That is possible. I think it’s just obscene to suggest that the richest country in the world can’t afford it.”

Diversity in Learning: A Vision for the Next Millennium

Tags: papert, learning, school