December 20, 2012

Assessing Higher Order Thinking Skills: On Brookhart’s 2010 ASCD book

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brookhart book“We still really don’t know how to assess problem-solving,” I heard a university professor of engineering say last week, and it resonated because it is so clear to me that while we all want to do more to educate our students in the work of solving complex problems and creative thinking, and we know the importance of assessment in driving this instruction, we nevertheless stumble in our clarity about what and how we ought to assess these things.

Most often the books I write about here are what might be viewed as the superstructure books– the writing about the future of learning and the most innovative practices for reinventing what and how we should be teaching.

Examples of this would be my reviews of Net Smart by Rheingold, Networked by Wellman and Rainey, Future Perfect by Johnson, and Zhao’s World Class Leaners. 

But sometimes it is useful to return to the foundations, and firm up our terms and concepts at more basic, but critical, levels— indeed, if we don’t do so, the superstructures will be that much more unwieldy.

This 2010 title, from ASCD, is exactly that, and I hope readers will forgive the “primer” nature of this post.   It would seem to me that schools which simply do the work to try to unify and make more consistent our language and practice around higher order thinking skills assessment will be well poised to then experiment, iterate, and innovate in this essential realm.

Brookhart begins by defining the core elements of what we mean by higher order thinking:

  • Transfer: relating learning to other elements beyond those they were taught to associate with it.
  • Critical thinking (judgment): reasonable, reflective thinking focused on what to believe or do, applying wise judgment and producing an informed critique.
  • Problem solving, including creative thinking: the non-automatic strategizing required for solving an open-ended problem, involving identifying problems, creating something new as a solution.

establishing three core components of what exactly effective assessment entails:

  1. Specify clearly and exactly what it is you want to assess.
  2. Design tasks or test items that require students to demonstrate this knowledge or skill.
  3. Decide what you will take as evidence of the degree to which students have shown this knowledge or skill.

and elaborating with three more principles of higher order thinking assessment:

  • Presenting something for students to think about, usually in the form of text, visuals, scenarios, resource material, problems.
  • Using novel material–material new to students, not covered in class and not subject to recall.
  • Distinguishing between level of difficult, easy versus hard, and level of thinking, lower order thinking/recall versus higher order thinking) and control for each separately. (more…)
 

November 11, 2012

Measuring Creativity: a “teaser” to the full post at SSATB.

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One of my main projects this year is serving as a member and consultant/writer for the Secondary School Admissions Testing Board (SSATB) Think Tank on the Future of Admissions Assessment.   More information on the Think Tank is here;  it’s charge is here. As part of my work I am posting a monthly column for the Think Tank; below is a “teaser” that post.  Click the link here or at bottom to read it in full. 

“Creativity,” Dr. Sternberg replied, when asked what addition to admissions assessment he would recommend if he had to limit himself to just one. Coming from the SSATB 2012 Annual Meeting’s keynote speaker, the former President of American Psychological Association, and arguably the world’s foremost scholar of – and experimental practitioner in – expanded admissions assessment, this is compelling counsel for our Think Tank’s work.

Using Sternberg as a framer and guide for the work of the Think Tank on the Future of Admissions Assessment is a no-brainer, and our time with him in Chicago was enormously valuable. In this post, we’ll take a deeper dive into assessing creativity; in future posts we’ll look at other Sternberg recommendations and many other aspects of expanded assessment for admissions.

Sternberg’s recommendation to prioritize creativity is both narrowly pragmatic and broadly idealistic.  Read on….

 

September 26, 2012

Networked, the new book by Rainie and Wellman: A review

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From the book:
“None of these technologies are isolated, or isolating, systems.   People are not hooked on gadgets– they are hooked on each other.

The new media is the new neighborhood. 

This is the era of free agents and the spirit of personal agency. But it is not the World According to Me– it not a world autonomous and increasingly isolated individualists.  Rather, it is the World According to the Connected Me. 

The more people use the internet, the more friends they have, the more they see their friends, and the more socially diverse their networks.  

People’s lives offline and online are now integrated– it no longer makes sense to make a distinction.”

This new book, Networked: The New Social Operating System by Lee Rainie (of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project) and Barry Wellman (of the University of Toronto’s NetLab),  to which I was directed by Howard Rheingold’s terrific Net Smart, is a refreshingly no-holds-barred,  full-throated advocacy for the power of the network to improve lives, learning, and society.

The book, sadly, is not a complete success;  at times its narrative flattens into research-report data drudgery, and sometimes its voice  speaks about contemporary digital lives to its readers as if we lived on Mars or in the 19th century:  much of what is explained requires little explanation.   And the two “interludes”- intended as richly described “days in the life” of a networked, wired young person– simply fail, I believe, to illuminate, inform or influence minds (more about this at bottom).

But, if you are caught up in the current intellectual debate about the value of online networking– if you are looking for helpful argumentation versus the Turkles and Carrs— this is a valuable book, collecting and sharing research based evidence and an idealistic vision for where we are headed as a society of increasingly networked individuals.  And if you are looking for guidance on how to be a more effective online citizen, or netizen, this book offers good guidance.

The title is Networked, but the argument is something a bit different: many of us are living now not in a networked society but lives of “networked individualism.”  Because it is as individuals we are networked– at the very same time that we are more connected, we are less group-defined, less tied to tight networks such as churches and small town communities.

This new world of networked individualism is oriented around looser, more fragmented networks that provide succor.

Small densely knit groups like families, villages, and small organizations have receded in recent generations.  A different social order has emerged around social networks that are more diverse and less overlapping than those previous groups.

The networked operating system offers new ways to solve problems and meet needs. It offers more freedom to individuals than people experienced in the past because now they have more room to manuevre and more capacity to act on their own. (more…)

 

September 18, 2012

The 7th C: Connectivism

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“There’s a seventh C too, you know” my neighboring seat-mate, the excellent educator Larry Kahn,  leaned over to whisper to me.   “Really,” I said, “what?”  “Connectivism.”

I wasn’t sure whether I was painfully behind the times, not already knowing about this seventh C, or alternatively that I’d been let into a secret club, the club of connectivism, but I was hooked.

Pat Bassett, the NAIS President, was presenting, and he shared with us his vision of the 6 C’s, be they 21st century skills or the essential capacities for success today: Critical Thinking, Communication, Collaboration, Creativity (the big 4 emphasized by P-21, edleader21, and Ken Kay), Character and Cosmopolitanism (Cross-Cultural Communication and Collaboration).

The elusive 7th C, though, I’m increasingly becoming convinced, is key: essential, exciting, empowering, elevating.   It captures something about learning today and tomorrow, and the way I understand it, it taps into, draws upon, and expresses (with its helpful first letter C), the power of networks and all that they can do to advance each of us individually and as groups.

This 7th C is just as important, I’m coming to believe, for ourselves to learn and develop and for us to faciliate our student learning, as any of other 6 C’s, even if, conceptually, it is still relatively more elusive than the first six.

Connectivism is defined on Wikipedia this way:

Connectivism was introduced as a theory of learning based on the premise that knowledge exists in the world rather than in the head of an individual. Connectivism proposes a perspective similar to the Activity theory of Vygotsky as it regards knowledge to exist within systems which are accessed through people participating in activities. (more…)

 

September 7, 2012

Networked Learning at the core of a new report on Innovating Pedagogy

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In the spirit of the NMC Horizon reports, a group of scholars at the Open University has prepared a thorough and thoughtful analysis of what is coming in pedagogy.     The 36 report is available here, and though its attention is focused upon post-secondary teaching and learning, there is much here that is highly applicable to those of us seeking to be more informed about coming trends in K-12 pedagogy.

The authors pay deference to the NMC Horizon reports, but explain they have a slightly different goal:

We acknowledge inspiration from the NMC Horizon Reports as well as other future-gazing reports on education. Those explore how innovations in technology might influence education; we examine how innovations in pedagogy might be enacted in an age of personal and networked technology.

In a short commentary on the report, an educational blogger who identifies himself only as “Derek” orders this reports coming innovations by immediacy:

  1. Personal inquiry learning  – Learning through collaborative inquiry and active investigation
  2. Seamless learning  – Connecting learning across settings, technologies and activities
  3. MOOCs – Massive open online courses
  4. Assessment for learning  – Assessment that supports the learning process through diagnostic feedback
  5. New pedagogy for e-books – Innovative ways of teaching and learning with next-generation e-books
  6. Publisher-led short courses – Publishers producing commercial short courses for leisure and professional development
  7. Badges to accredit learning  – Open framework for gaining recognition of skills and achievements
  8. Rebirth of academic publishing  – New forms of open scholarly publishing
  9. Learning analytics – Data-driven analysis of learning activities and environments
  10. Rhizomatic learning – Knowledge constructed by self-aware communities adapting to environmental conditions

Setting aside numbers six and eight from the list atop, which simply don’t interest me very much, and deferring four and nine to a separate discussion at bottom, focus upon the remaining six (1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10), which lead me to draw out what I think is the single most important unifying theme and takeaway from this report:

the future of learning lies in a student-centered, web 2.0 empowered, networked connectivism.   This is the New Culture of Learning, and we owe it to our own life-long learning and to our students to study this mode closely and exploit every opportunity to advance it. 

Note that in nearly all of these six, technology is essential, particularly the power of the internet.   Personal inquiry learning and badges, of course, are ancient, but are both accelerated dramatically by learning online.

Below let me share some key quotes from the document, with comments, to draw out this unifying theme: (more…)

 

August 28, 2012

Yong Zhao’s World Class Learners: A Mixed Review

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Like most of my friends and colleagues in the 21st century learning arena, I hold high regard for Yong Zhao.   It is an enormous asset for our movement to have his global perspective and all that he brings from his expertise in Chinese education as a comparison and a warning for developments in US education, and beyond his tremendous knowledge base, it is just wonderful how enthusiatic and passionate he is about unleashing students and celebrating their diverse and creative spirits.

I’ve written about Zhao here before, praising his previous book Catching Up or Leading the Way, and I was grateful to have him join my pages on one occasion, as he added commentary to a sharp debate I was having in several posts and comment sections with Bob Compton regarding his film, Two Million Minutes, the 21st century solution.  (Scroll down to comment number 9.)

This new book carries forward many of the themes of the previous, and indeed, in one section, about the curious pattern of US and Chinese education each seeking to emulate the other,  it feels particularly repetitive.   That said, it is an incredibly important discussion about which Zhao has deep insight, and he has brought it up to date with many new supporting details.

One of those new details regards the bizarre laws the Chinese national government is putting into place sharply limiting, to the point of fines, the number of days and hours students can be in school, in an effort to circumscribe the obsessed workaholic-ism that overcomes so many Chinese students and ultimately, the argument goes, curtails their creativity, happiness, and self-confidence.   In an effort to evade these strict prohibitions, one school, the story is told, bussed its students to a different city to live in dorms and undertake an extra two weeks of study.

What stands out in the new book are three important messages.  First, the Common Core is deeply flawed and detrimental to what ought to be our society’s primary objective for education, to develop creative, innovative, entrepreneurial citizens.   Second, entrepreneurship is, in of itself, the single best descriptor for that objective, and Zhao takes care to define it and imbue it with his enthusiasm.

Third, and most fully, we can describe the ideal educations for developing this most important objective, and it is a combination of the What: student autonomy and voice; the How, Product-Oriented Learning; and the Where: Globally, in every way we can.

Throughout my reading of World Class Learners, I find myself more conflicted than I expected.    From Zhao’s perspective, and it is a sound one, the US is deeply at risk of having already gone too far, and now accelerating toward, making the deep, fundamental mistake of Chinese education, centralizing it around a narrow set of high, content-oriented, academic standards which are tested in extremely high stakes assessments.   Because of that, he seeks to push back, push back hard against the entire agenda, and he is right to do so.

But at times, this reader fears he takes a bit of a step too far.  We want to free our students from such centralized high pressure testing and we do want to celebrate, honor and affirm our students extraordinary diversity of talents and ambitions, but we also want them to learn deeply, richly, masterfully, an array of essential skills and we believe they will do best in content rich subjects.   I am not suggesting Zhao, whom I’d like to count as a friend, speaks against academic excellence, but whether by design or inadvertently, his book allows too frequently the inference that he is not as concerned as I am about strong academic accomplishment. (more…)

 

August 13, 2012

The Leader’s Guide to 21st century Education by Kay and Greenhill: An enthusiastic review

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It is easy to say that we want our schools to adopt a 21st century learning program; it is only a little bit harder to describe what that program looks like.    The real work, we all know, is in the execution.   Ken Kay and Val Greenhill, the team who led (Ken was Founding President) the Partnership for 21st century skills (P21) recognized this a couple years ago, and shifted the focus of their important work from calling for this transformation and from describing a program to, instead, supporting the leaders who are executing it in their districts and schools, in a new organization called EdLeader21.

In doing so, they are working with, supporting and learning from, an assemblage of some of the very most interesting and exciting school superintendents in the country, including Pam Moran, Jared Cotton, Jim Merrill, and, right here in Tucson, Mary Kamerzall.    With the benefit of this experience, they have now written a very valuable, very informative book, about which the only significant criticism is that it leaves the reader with an angst for more– more such information, more detail, specifics and examples: when is the sequel coming?   I’ll throw in a few notes here about the areas I most hope to hear more about.

Full disclosure time:  I enjoyed greatly my one year experience with edleader21, and have been an advocate for that organization.   I know Ken and Val personally, and am delighted to be neighbors of a sort with them here in Tucson (in fact, I am writing this in a central Tucson Starbucks, and I keep looking over my shoulder in case one or the other of them walks up behind me).   The complimentary copy of the book I am reviewing was sent to me as a kind courtesy on their part, with a warm and generous inscription.

Ken and I co-presented at NAIS in February, 2011, in a session entitled 21st century learning at NAIS Schools: Leading and Networking for Progress.  (My own remarks for that session were a slightly condensed version of a post I published also in February, 2011, 7 Steps for Leading in 21st century Learning.)

This new book expands upon a series Ken published last summer (2011) on Edutopia, a 7 part series on becoming a 21st century school district.”

Ken and Val’s first step is, of course, the essential and universal first step: “Adopt your vision” (just as my version of the seven steps commences with “Develop your vision (and Keep developing it.”)   The discussion here is rich and invigorating; it will energize readers.

There is no single version for 21st century student success that is the same in every school or district.   Lasting success always comes down to leaders like you.   For the vision to make an actual difference in students’ lives, it must come from and be embraced by the leaders of the school and district.  A vision that is born of genuine, authentic, passionate leadership is never simple, never cookie-cutter, and never easy.  But it is necessary.

Especially resonant for me is this quote from Virginia Beach Superintendent Jim Merrill:

I have finally found the thing in education that truly motivates me and it’s this 21st century education initiative.   This is why I am supposed to be a leader in this field.

The overview of the 8 key “perspectives” which are bringing so many to this appreciation for the importance of a shift in teaching and learning is excellent; I learned a great deal.   There is a powerful graph showing the change in workforce categories coming into our century, and good stats from a 2010 report that more than half of companies surveyed do measure the 4Cs in their performance review.

John Bransford, the renowned learning expert: is helpfully quoted:

in the US today we tell our kids the same thing 100 times and on the 101st time, we ask them if they can remember what we told them the first hundred times when in the 21st century the coin of the realm is if they can look at material they have never seen before and know what to do with it.

This first step/chapter, by itself, would be highly worthwhile reading for boards, education students, and others.   (more…)

 

August 2, 2012

Teaching and Assessing 21st century Skills: Hits and Misses of Marzano/Solution Tree’s disappointing study

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The title of this book speaks to me, of course: although teaching and assessing 21st century skills is by no means the only thing we should be doing in our schools, regular readers here recognize the importance I place on helping our schools do a better job of helping students have the critical higher order thinking skills and practical communication and collaboration skills to be highly effective problem-solvers.

This Solution-Tree publication, part of a “classroom strategies series,”  isn’t a narrative by any means, not a summer reading recommendation qualifier,  but rather a bit of a stodgy, text-book like overview of the topic at hand.   It is probably primarily intended for students, which can be seen in the comprehension questions at the end of each chapter, and so it may influence future generations of teachers in its framework.

Two takeaways loom largest: one positive, one negative.   After discussing each, I’ll run through some smaller points.

The strongest element offered in the book lies  in its enriched and broadened definition of 21st century skills.   Rather than accepting a simpler list of skills such the 4 C’s (Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity), Marzano/Heflebower set out a set of both cognitive and what they call conative skills, and put them on an equal plane.   More than that, they round out conative skills to include a wide range of what I sometimes think of as character skills–character broadly defined.

What is conative?  My spell check here doesn’t recognize it– it appears throughout my draft with an ugly squiggly red line beneath.   The Free dictionary defines conation as: The aspect of mental processes or behavior directed toward action or change and including impulse, desire, volition, and striving.  Nice; I like it, and may add it to my vocabulary.

The authors explain:

Conative skills refer to one’s ability to analyze situations in light of what one knows and feels and select appropriate actions…. where personality and intelligence overlap to facilitate decision making.   A simplified way of thinking about conation is that it is the process of combining what one knows (cognition) with what one feels (affection) and deciding what action to take in light of both.

Previously to this, I have usually set “conative” skills to the side– not as undesirable, but as existing in a different category from “21st century skills.”  The work we did at St. Gregory to broaden student reporting of learning to include a skill set of what we called “essential goals” for our students, I often explained, included a mixture of 21st century and character, moral and performance character, goals and skills– but it closely matched this Marzano set of 21st century skills defined widely.

Their list:

Cognitive and Conative Skills for the 21st century

Cognitive Skills

  • Analyzing and utilizing information
  • Addressing complex problems and issues
  • Creating patterns and mental models

Conative Skills

  • Understanding and controlling oneself
  • Understanding and Interacting with Others.

The cognitive skills provided are mostly familiar, although it is useful to expand thinking skills to include mental models and visualization, which I sometimes overlook or underplay.   The conative set includes the “working with others” piece which is so important, and I love the way they rope in things which I also believe to be SO important– the growth mindset, resilience, and optimism– and which sometimes I and others leave outside, as softer, “psychological” stuff which are less critical.     Dweck and Seligman have influenced my world view, and my own internal, mental attitudes, enormously in the past decade, and it is terrific to see them get this prominent play here.

The big weakness: The book fails, and fails deeply I think, in offering far too little thinking about structuring curriculum and learning experiences broadly, richly, and holistically so as to “teach and assess 21st century skills.”    Though there are many fine slices and slivers of lessons, some of them just mere moments, by which teachers can advance the book’s purpose, they are sadly discrete, isolated, individual islands.

The assessment chapter is almost heartbreaking.   (more…)

 

March 6, 2012

Digital Video Teaching AND Learning: Using Youtube at St. Gregory in a Myriad of Ways

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I’ve written before about the extraordinary value and significance of digital video for enhanced teaching and learning; as Chris Anderson writes in Wired Magazine:

 I believe that the arrival of free online video may turn out to be just as significant a media development as the arrival of print. It is creating new global communities, granting their members both the means and the motivation to step up their skills and broaden their imaginations. It is unleashing an unprecedented wave of innovation in thousands of different disciplines: some trivial, some niche in the extreme, some central to solving humanity’s problems.

In short, free online video is boosting the net sum of global talent. It is helping the world get smarter…. Video is the killer app.  Don’t write me.  Tell me. Show me.

When I was a teacher in the nineties, videos were much harder to access, often expensive, and somehow it seemed the mentality was that if you were going to show a video, you ought to show an entire hour– a full episode for instance of “Eyes on the Prize” or “The Civil War.”  The youtube revolution, however, has unleashed not only an enormous array of video opportunities, for free, but also shifted the mindset to the power of short video- five minutes is too long, 2-3 minutes perfect.  It is for illumination, not full-length exposition.

And as we recognize the power of digital video-watching for student understanding, we also come to see the critical importance of the digital video-making for student skill development.  It is the third leg of a communication skill set, joining written and oral communication.    As the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote last year

Film students aren’t the only ones producing videos for homework these days. Professors teaching courses in writing, geology, forensics, sociology, anthropology, foreign languages, and many other disciplines now assign video projects, pushing students to make arguments formatted for the YouTube age.

video is only one aspect of multimedia literacy, which can also include other forms of digital communication, including audio and interactive presentations. “It’s really being able to communicate effectively in a networked culture.”

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I’m lifting the following from our weekly St. Gregory Hawks e-view newsletter; it is a monthly column prepared by our Technology Director Andrei Henriksen, a series he calls Trending site of the month:   This month’s subject is YouTube use, and he has helpfully collected reports from a number of our teachers about the way they are using youtube, as an element of our 1:1 laptop program, in class. My thanks to both Andrei and these teachers

✹ English, Dr. Kate Oubre

First semester, students in English 1 produce a creative project including a written memoir/story, original art, and an original promotional video uploaded onto YouTube and inserted into their own Google site page.  Students this year focused on food and culture and produced such works as“The Perfect Gift” with animation, and “St. Patrick’s Day Supper,” with a slide show and written narration.

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✹ History, Dr. Michelle Berry

We use YouTube in both my Seminar in US History and my AP U.S. Government courses.  Most recently, students uploaded their own videos from the APGOV Campaign Project to YouTube.  For an example: 

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January 4, 2012

Design Build Tech Innovations Class Work, Part 1: Hexapod, Rockets, and Trebuchet

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I’ve been writing recently about FabLabs (here and here), and the importance of providing times, ways, and places for students to design and build their own “solutions” to problems, especially problems they discover, and to refine those “solutions” in multiple iterations.

(Be sure to see the two other posts sharing class work also: here and here).

At St. Gregory, where we aspire to “create innovators,” one of our most important and most exciting initiatives over the past two years has been the steady advance of our “Design Build”  Tech Innovations class,  taught by the amazing and awesome Mr. Dennis Conner.   It is an entirely PBL formatted class, with no set curriculum other than having students investigate “problems” and choose one to design and build solutions for.

The class continues to be a great success, and the difficult question looming for us at St. Gregory is whether to decide to move it from an optional elective (it is taught pass-fail, students can take it as many times as they wish, and it has received great enthusiasm from its participants) to a required freshman or sophomore class, formatted as an “introduction to and foundations of innovation” class.     The jury is still out on this one.

Suzie Boss, an edutopia blogger and author of Reinventing Project Based Learning with Technology, and  who visited St. Gregory last spring for two days, wrote this recently, in a piece entitled “How Design Build Curriculum Can Transform a Community.”

Where does a project like this fit into current discussions of 21st-century skills?

Our students are learning skills like welding and carpentry, 2D and 3D modeling. But those are the vehicles to do something else. We blog as much as we’re on the table saw. We’re giving them tools for entrepreneurship, for innovation, for local citizenship and engagement. We’re giving them a way to think through problems in their own lives. Design is all about possibility. For a student, that’s the best gift you can give them.

With the fall semester now completed, I want to share, in this post and in two following posts, examples of student work completed in the past few months by their own reports.  You can find the whole set on the class website here.

Spencer B’s project: a HEXAPOD

This is a hexapod. A hexapod is a robot with 6 ‘legs’, in this case with 3dof per leg. And before I bore you, I want to tell you that this is quite possibly the greatest project I have ever worked on. It has cost me, so far, just below 1k. Bit expensive, no? But the experience and result has been worth it. Intrigued?

This has been a labor of love. It’s been frustrating. It still won’t walk, this is because I had no idea about its power consumption. 8 amps? Despite that ridiculous number for a rather small robot, the control program (which consists of a virtual cube you can rotate with arrow keys and change with a few keystrokes) is nearly there! I’ll post it later on.

The robot was constructed primarily out of anodized aluminum parts and 18 servos. It includes a high amp regulator, as well as a microcontroller and a radio module. It looks like something out of a Sci-Fi movie. Here’s a link to where I got the parts:   WWW.LYNXMOTION.COM

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Clayton M’s project: Rockets!

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Michael and others: the Trebuchet 2:

Filmed at our soccer field just behind our Science Laboratories, and also at a Trebuchet competition held in October on the campus of the University of Arizona, in which our students competed.

 

November 28, 2011

Presidential campaign 2016: Student videos and websites for Senior Politics class

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Some of my favorite elements of excellent learning are:

  • engaging students in making connections from their learning to “real world” issues and concerns;
  • motivating and rewarding students by asking them to do work that matters to them personally and which they can invest themselves into, developing as they do a stronger sense of their own identity and their own unique worldview;
  • asking students to use, develop, and demonstrate outstanding 21st century skills and digital proficiencies, and in particular using effective digital communication tools such as websites and digital videos;
  • and asking, expecting, and even insisting that students prepare and present high quality, finished, polished “products” as culminations of their learning experiences, and use these finished products as goals and ends toward which their learning journeys are progressing.

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In a recent extended assignment for our excellent History and Social Studies teacher and department Chair, Michelle Berry, Ph.D., students were asked to prepare 2016 Presidential campaigns, including campaign ads on digital video and full blown websites.

Here I am sharing three video advertisement examples, and two websites.   The first comes from student Jackson R., who prepared a Green Party Presidential campaign with himself playing the part of Robert Forrest.   Be sure to click on the image above to visit his extraordinarily comprehensive and near-professionally produced campaign website, and enjoy his campaign ad video.  (more…)

 

November 19, 2011

Structuring Personal Learning Environments for Students: Useful Guidance from Wendy Drexler

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In the project to educate our students to be digitally savvy and empower them to use the resources of the web to best pursue their own passions in learning as well as to research, evaluate, and use information in their coursework, we could stand to be more intentional in helping them shape their online environment than we have been thus far.

Truth be told, I could stand to be more savvy in my own organizing of online learning and networking: I’ve been slow to use tools and develop skills for managing online resource, such as the use of vehicles like Symbaloo, Evernote, or Diigo, and I want to take inspiration from the 7th grade student in the video above to move forward in this way and learn and practive better these skills and with these tools.

In a valuable, but not web-posted (as far as I can see), article in the recent Independent School magazine, Wendy Drexler, a former independent school educator who is now directing online learning at Brown University, offers advice on facilitating students in shaping their personal learning environments.

A PLE is the method students use to organize their self-directed online learning, including the tools they employ to gather information, conduct research, and present their findings.    As the name implies, PLEs give learners a high degree of control over their work by allowing them to customize the learning experience and connect to others, including experts in the field. (more…)

 

November 16, 2011

Generation Sell, or the Entrepreneurial Self: Autonomy, Adventure, and Imagination

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Among my great goals is to assist my students, and my colleagues,  in becoming better “entrepreneurs” in the best and broadest of senses: creative, innovative, risk-taking, initiators who bring new and great things to life, solve problems, and enrich our world.   I want for my students, and for my colleagues and myself, to become more “entrepreneurial,” and think that social entrepreneurship is among the most exciting developments in the world of work and service in the world today.

Even should we find ourselves in the midst of large organizations, it would seem to me that we can have a greater impact and find more fulfillment if we practice habits of entrepreneurship.   In a world of seven billion people, I think we all can find great rewards and can make a greater impact if we seize and grab the tools available to us, including digital and online technologies, to become better communicators, advocates, collaborators and creators.

Three days ago, though, to my surprise, I read a lengthy essay making, poorly I think, the opposite argument: today’s entrepreneurialism, aided by today’s social media, is resulting in nothing but a disappointing “Generation Sell.”

William Deresiewicz has become one among favorite sparring partners; in last Sunday’s New York Times he tackles the Millenials (our students), and, because they are “polite, pleasant, moderate, earnest, friendly,” he decides to deride them as “Generation Sell… The millennial affect is the affect of the salesman.” (more…)

 

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