Education is Everywhere
June 11, 2008 by Intrepidteacher
Part I
A few days ago, I was chatting with Lindsea on Skype about a variety of topics: music, education, and the need for adults to communicate more often and more in depth with students. We briefly brainstormed a few ideas we each had for the EduPunk challenge, when we arrived at the following slogan for her Street Art campaign: “Education everywhere. Take back your education.” We discussed the idea of Guerrilla Learning, and the idea that we realized was repeatedly emerging was this need for students and teachers/adults to meld their networks.
In the last few months, I have been lucky enough to be involved in a small but growing community of teachers and students who seem to be connected on a variety of projects. Intrepid Classroom, in part, grew from this already fecund community. Students like Hannah, Soojin, and Lindsea are working closely with teachers like Clay, Dianne, Mr.Mayo, Paul Allison, and myself to blur the lines of the traditional educational model. We are working to help each other understand that “Education is everywhere” and we want to “Take back our education.”
Below are snippets from the transcript of our chat:
Lindsea: What’s greater that I know I am able to learn on my own
Me: We, teachers are always trying to paint ourselves out of the picture, but if we are worthless than what the hell are we doing teaching? I have lived a pretty cool life. I’ve lived in Africa, worked in the Bronx, I have an MA blah blah blah, and I have a lot to teach teenagers, stuff that I wish some of the old fogies would have taken the time to teach me.
Lindsea: I don’t want teachers to stop teaching
Me: So student centered doesn’t mean without a teacher
Lindsea: I want the wisdom and the stories. I just want to be included. I just want to have power, I want to be listened to, I don’t believe in student only learning. What’s BS is the fact that students are “listened to” but aren’t heard. The classroom needs to stop being a stage for teachers. We need to break the fourth wall interact with the audience
Me: Yeah but institutions like education take a long time to change, so here we are light years ahead of what Mr. Joe Average is doing. The question is how do we instill a love of learning to the masses. School is not designed to help kids find what they love, it is designed to fill their head with “knowledge” get them ready for college, a good job and so on. School should teach kids how to learn.
Lindsea: What I’m trying to promote is this: FIND PASSION, LEARN THROUGH PASSION, SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING W/ TEACHERS’ GUIDANCE
Me: Yeah but those teenage years are tricky, because when you give young people total freedom, they don’t know what to do, most of them.
You have been so trained to please and be rewarded with grades, that you don’t know how to follow your own passion, most of you.Me: Take Intrepid Classroom. There have been some great discussions, and maybe that is where learning is taking place, but it feels like everyone is waiting for me to call the next shot.
Lindsea: The teachers help them make goals and essential questions and then have checkpoints, etc
So what do you think about this discussion?
Part II
How do we safely combine these networks? How is it that I was able to openly and freely chat with Lindsea via Skype? Is this okay? Are you ready for it? There are many questions, but it is vital that we look at them, because if education is everywhere than you need to learn how to access it and be safe.
Teachers often send students mixed messages: The internet is a scary dark shadowy place filled with equally dark and shadowy figures looking to track you down and do you harm. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Next breath, use the internet to meet and communicate with as many people as you can to help you become a more self-directed learner.
What is a motivated risk-taking learner to do? There are thousands of online articles about cyber safety and online bullying, so I will not give you advice. Rather, I want to hear from the experts, you! What do you do? How do you know what is a safe and appropriate relationship online? I raise these questions because we have recently had a few new teachers join the Ning. At first I was thrilled, because the influx of new adult voices into Intrepid Classroom, is just what Lindsea and I were talking about. These teachers should be great resources and potential members of your fledgling networks. But then, the paranoia began to rattle around my brain: As our community grows how will we know who to trust and interact with? How do we know that some stranger does not enter our midst and do us harm?
I want Intrepid Classroom to be as open as possible, but that does not mean that we shouldn’t be aware of the potential of danger. I have collected all of the questions raised in this post and listed them below. Please take the time to comment on what you read. When you are done, please find the new teachers: Mr.Kimmi, Mrs. Durff, and don’t forget about Shelly Krausse and Nirvana Rose Watkins. Make some contact with these people. See how these adults may be able to help you learn. As for the new teachers to Intrepid Classroom, please take the time to meet some of our students as well. Let this new model of network begin. We are adults and students with one goal: “Education everywhere. Take back your education.”
Here are the questions to think about:
- How do we instill a love of learning to the masses?
- What are your thoughts about the discussion with Lindsea?
- How do we safely combine adult and student networks?
- How is it that I was able to openly and freely chat with Lindsea via Skype? Is this okay? Are you ready for it?
- What is a motivated risk-taking learner to do?
- What do you do about Internet safety?
- How do you know what is a safe and appropriate relationship online?
- As our community grows, how will we know who to trust and interact with?
- How do we know that some stranger does not enter our midst and do us harm?
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Take Back Your Education!
We most definitely need to teach students how to learn, not just knowledge.
I think that this talk was able to happen because you are not Lindsea’s “real,” formal teacher. The teachers that we interact with every day see both our mature actions and those ever-so-rare immature days. I guess it can be hard to take us seriously when talking about ideas. Perhaps some can’t get the immature us out of their minds and so we’re discredited.
However, more of these talks need to happen. Everyone has input of value that just needs to find a platform.
As for online safety, assume the best at first. If the person becomes inappropriate, we get rid of them. Block them or whatever, but you just ignore them until they go away, or remove them from your online locations. Because not everyone will know someone when they join, we need to be open to new names.
Great work! Here is a really early draft of something I am experimenting with. Input welcome, and of course, please steal this idea. I didn’t invent it.
This course is built upon collaborative inquiry:
We are committed to asking questions together, in person and online. The texts, the in-class-discussions, and online discourse in multiple mediums revolve around collaborative inquiry in which students pursue as a group questions about the issues suggested by the texts and raised by the communication media we use as part of the course. The instructor, together with student teaching teams, leads co-exploration of and co-experimentation with social media theory and practice. There is no canon to be transmitted. Knowledge is to be actively explored, interrogated, critically analyzed, collaboratively assembled by the class as a whole. Cyberculture studies requires tunneling through disciplinary boundaries and looking at questions through multiple lenses. The instructor will invite exploration, suggest themes, point out linkages, ask, guide, contest, participate, provide resources; but from the beginning, students are charged as individuals and as a community of learning with constructing the knowledge we harvest from these inquiries.
Collaborative inquiry requires individual committment to active participation
Learning and practicing social media competencies and understanding the social dimensions of cyberspace should be fun and should enable students to have a voice in one of the most important emerging aspects of global society — the power of every desktop computer or smart phone to function as a worldwide printing press, broadcasting station, community center, political organizing tool. Students will develop important skills that are directly relevant to their personal development and their place in the world after graduation, but the price for learning to use the Social Media Collaboratory for collaborative inquiry is a serious committment of time and attention by every member of the learning group. We will be engaged in a continuing discursive process that cannot be fulfilled by just turning in homework when it is due. Peers will need each other’s input in inquiries, debates, collaborative writing, team teaching, and group projects. To get the most out of this course, and to get a good grade, students should be expected to devote approximately eight hours per week:
Individual work
4 hours reading per week
1 hour each week viewing video online
1 hour each week in written reflection in personal learning journal
1/2 hour each week in preparation for student teaching or group project collaboration
1 1/2 hours of individual online activity each week in forums, blogs, wikis, chats, twitter, and/or other media
Collaborative projects
Each student will participate in two different kinds of collaborative projects. First, students collaborate in preparing, teaching, and leading inquiry during a class on a specific text. In addition students will organize teams of five to conduct an independent inquiry (research project) during the last half of the course.
Key Theme Team Teaching Project
Each student will use the wiki to sign up with two other students to be responsible for co-teaching a specific text. Teams must sign up at least two weeks in advance, arrange to meet with instructor during office hours at least a week before the presentation. Each team will be responsible for going beyond a book report or identification of material likely to be on a final exam — “teaching,” in the sense of this assignment means, in the words of Keats, “igniting, not pouring.” In addition to succincty presenting the key arguments and important terms, issues, and ideas of each reading, the teaching team formulates five questions for five different student groups, designed to initiate inquiry likely to lead to deeper knowledge of the text’s subject, The teaching team leads the wiki-based process of capturing and distilling collective knowledge from classroom and online discussions.
During Class
During class, the teaching team will
(1) Present what they decide is the essence of the texts — use of interactive multimedia for presentations via Google docs, Voicethread, Wiki, PowerPoint, Youtube, mindmapping, is encouraged.
(2) Distribute their generative questions to five break-out groups who will convene, then report back about their discussions — conclusions, open questions, conflicts, key arguments and insights.
A key objective of this course is to develop a mindfulness about and the beginnings of a literacy about the way we use attention in a situation with other co-present humans, each of whom has wireless Internet access. During student teaching presentations, the presenting team will be the the only students to keep their laptops open. One member of the team will initiate a section in the wiki collaborative learning journal page for that class session — entering before class the key points of the team’s presentation, and other essential elements, and amending it with notes in real time during the classroom discussion. Another member of the presenting team will be the keeper of the lexicon, identifying in real time the key terms and phrases raised by the text and discussion, and entering them into the lexicon portion of the collaborative learning journal. The third member of the team will search the Web in real time for relevant links and add them to the wiki during class discussion.
After Class
During the week after each class, each student is required to add at least one substantial contribution to the learning journal — expanding on existing notes, adding new material, adding links to relevant sources, posing questions and comments. Each team member is expected to put in at least 4 hours in preparing for their teaching session, and to meet as a team with the instructor before their session.
Final Course Project
During the last five weeks, teams of five students will use social media of their choice and face to face meetings to design, implement, and docment independent inquiries into some aspect of the course subject matter; multimedia group presentations, no longer than 20 minutes, will take place during the last class meeting; over the last five weeks of the course, each student is expected to devote at least 9 hours after class to the team project in addition to the six hours of individual work required weekly.
http://www.edutopia.org/ikid-digital-learner-technology-2008
Ooh.
For a fun way to teach internet and social networking safety, here’s a unit that includes an instructional video and a quiz. It’s aimed at middle school and up.
http://www.auntlee.com/safety/
The video is a selection of silly clips supposedly posted to the MySpace pages of the famous auntlee.com puppy and some of her friends. The clips demonstrate mistakes kids can make – the clips and the quiz serve as a jumpstart to further discussions.
Kids can take the interactive Flash version online, or you can download a .pdf document and print it as a handout. The 10 question quiz covers the topics of cyber-bullying, privacy, safety, dangers of spyware and malware, etc.
The quiz doesn’t really focus on stranger-danger type concerns but rather gently and humorously reminds the reader that it’s possible to hurt people’s feelings, to mislead people who don’t realize you’re joking, to remember that online postings can be seen by anybody and that postings are often impossible to remove once posted.