Technology and Hope

We all struggle at times, whether it's work, family, school, friends, relationships, money, or some unholy combination of them and everyone has their own way of coping with the stress and the chaos.  Some are more healthy than others, and today I want to talk about one of the ways I am reminded of all the awesome things the world has in store for me and others, even when I'm struggling.

I like to research cool things about space, and everything to do with it.  It's a mind boggling concept, that we are an insignificantly small bag of molecules on a large rock orbiting a star that is one of about 400 billion stars in our galaxy out of about 500 billion other galaxies.  We are also the only thing on the planet with the cognitive ability to comprehend those numbers.  Our mental complexity is what enables us to think about our own insignificance, which I for one find humorous.

Anyway, space is cool, and I'll hurry up and get to the thing I found out about this week that has made me excited about the future.  Ion engines exist, and have been used on spacecraft.

Now you may be thinking, big whoop.  So they came up with some fancy new engine, they are doing stuff like that all the time.  If this is the case, you may need to hand in any sci-fi cred you claim to possess, because ion engines are one of the core pieces of sci-fi spaceships.

For example the TIE fighter from Star Wars.  If you weren't already aware, TIE stands for Twin Ion Engine.

So you may say that it's just some new crazy engine that is only useful for silly space stuff, but to me, it means we are one step closer to exploring the galaxy, and one step closer to me being able to fly a TIE fighter in space.

Not Getting Caught Up in Tech

I want to jot down a short reflection on a recent project that reminded me of something.

This week was an eventful one for my students and me, we completed our first exhibition together and it was a pretty big success.  The project itself was something that my cooperating teacher had done in years past and I was pretty nervous about the whole thing.  One of the main reasons I was nervous was due to its almost completely technology-less format.  The students would be getting large player's guides that resembled a page of worksheets, using physical materials throughout the project and exhibition, and overall an absence of technology that left me feeling a bit exposed.

There were a few technology bits, I shared resources and materials with the students via Drive and they had to do some research using class computers but it was quite a bit less than I was used to.

Ultimately the success of the project was an abrupt reminder that despite the awesome and rapidly expanding abilities of technology it is merely one medium through which students can learn, not an all important panacea for all the difficulties teachers are faced with.

Also, how much I missed the convenience that advances in technology have afforded me and how much I appreciate all the work my own teachers did without it.

Not time to throw out the computer yet.

A Reflection on a Michael Welsh TED Talk

Learning in New Media Environments



Mike starts off talking about his experience in a remote village in Indonesia that had little contact with the outside world, and the substantial changes that occurred when a new media was introduced.  From here he launches into the main point of his argument that the current structure of university classrooms breeds common issues that teach students to ask the wrong questions.  His goal is to move students from learning discrete content knowledge to learning skills that are usable across subjects and media and gives a few examples of how he has used media to move in that direction, focusing on a project that involves student making simulations of world history and trying to solve the problems that come up.  Students are rarely completely successful at the project but they leave the class with lots of the right questions.

It's an interesting video to watch as someone who is still taking university courses.  On the one hand I have lead a rather accomplished academic career and consider myself a "knowledge-able" learner as he terms it, and I achieved this is the same system he is critiquing.  His talk definitely made me think about how much more entertaining and fulfilling the path could have been should I have had a majority of the instruction from teachers like him.  The courses I am currently in are a blend of the old and the new models, and both still seem to serve the students well for their intended purposes.

Since I am in a graduate school of education with a well respected staff, I can assume that the majority of professors have seen this video or one like it that espouses the same educational ideals.  Assuming that they all agree that the old model needs fixing, the fact that not all of them have shifted away from it speaks to the difficulty of the task.  Either due to some innate difficulty or that we have been steeped for so long in the old model, or some hybrid of the two, it is apparent that is not a proverbial flick of the switch.

For my own teaching this means that I must reflect purposefully on all my methods and how they are helping students become "knowledge-able" and guiding them towards the right kinds of questions.

A Reflection on “Why You Need to Fail” by Derek Sivers

This was an interesting video to watch with a critical eye.  There is a lot of common sense advice embedded in this video, mixed with a variety of analogies that are at times amusing.  His three main responses to his title are:  if you’re not failing you’re not learning, growth mindset, and experiments.  

The first section covers the ideas of “no pain no gain” and muscle building, where the investment in or cost of learning is measured by the amount of failed or imperfect attempts.  His central ideas here are that mistakes teach better than preparation and doing what you know is fun, but it doesn’t improve you.  

The second section covers what he calls a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset, which have been linked to an educational distinction in students, a mastery oriented student (growth) or a goal oriented student (fixed).  The mastery oriented student completes tasks with the idea of mastering the content or skills while the goal oriented student completes tasks for the sake of a goal, often a grade.  Mastery oriented students are driven by intrinsic motivation, ideal for learning, and goal oriented students are driven by extrinsic motivation, less ideal.  Mr. Sivers discusses how students who are praised for their hard work tend towards a growth mindset and those who are praised for their innate talent tend towards a fixed mindset.  

The third section discusses the value of experiments and how when presented with a choice we have a selection of options to choose from, and argues that because we choose one option we are choosing to experiment with the results of that choice.  He follows this with the reasoning that since everything is an experiment, there are no failures (would be interesting to apply this philosophy to grading).

This video is an excellent one to watch, especially for teachers.  Not only does it make some great points about how to praise students but it’s a great reminder as to why teaching is a reiterative process.  Teachers can be effective and still “fail”, but that’s not the point, the point is that we learn from each failure  and move on to improving it or finding something better.

Which is a great point to segue into my disagreements with the video.  First and foremost his use of the word “fail.”  The word has a finality built into its meaning that does an injustice to the important topic being discussed in the video.  Failure is an absolute state, either one has failed or one has not, and as I mentioned above one can try at the same thing and improve it every single time.  This does not make each and every non-optimal attempt a failure, because they are not absolute states of failure.  A more accurate title would be “Why You Need to Make Mistakes.”  Mistakes are the key, and one can make mistakes without failing, one can learn from mistakes and seek to eliminate them, which is an important part of the experimental process he mentions.  Experimentation, above all else, is an iterative process and a key component of effective teaching.  While failure certainly includes mistakes, it is not a necessary part of learning, and can be very detrimental.  Instead it serves one better to aim to do as well as possible and make note of mistakes, and then seek to fix them.

Publishing Research Online

So this isn't directly about using ed tech in the classroom but it's been on my mind, so I'm going to talk it out. For our Action Research we are publishing it on a website, specifically our weebly site that we created as part of our program earlier in the year.

This poses an interesting dilemma for me because I have a rather in depth knowledge of how most people browse the internet and I can say with a fair amount of certainty that one of the most common traits of the average internet browser is a desire for small pieces of digestible content that they can get through relatively quickly.  As one would imagine this is not easily compatible with the idea of publishing research online, which is by nature rather lengthy and involved.


Now I've brainstormed various methods to combat this, chunking information into smaller pieces, presenting as much data as I can in a visual format, keeping all the less-important parts brief to allow room for expanding on the more important parts, and in general doing whatever I can to cater to the internet browsing patterns of the average person.

I don't have a resolution for this issue yet, but perhaps it's a problem someone else has successfully solved.

Integrating Technology Into Projects

My students recently completed a project called "Selling Science."  They had a lot of fun with the interdisciplinary part, they researched scientific issues or phenomenon in Chemistry and created chemistry demos to showcase their issue.  In Humanities they created podcasts that showcased the issue and found experts in fields related to their topic to interview for sound bytes.  While they weren't too thrilled with the extensive revision process and vetting of scripts, they were intent on doing well in the NPR student competition they were submitting their podcasts to.  Exhibition was a success for the most part, and they incorporated technology through a projector displaying the voting results for best podcasts, and parents and visitors could vote through PollEverywhere and everyone got to see the competition for votes.

However I was somewhat concerned that the students were sending off their podcasts to NPR and likely never interact with them again.  So I helped them and my cooperating teacher create a QR code sheet that could be emailed out to the school and displayed on their Digital Portfolios to at the very least archive their efforts for whatever future use they may have for it but hopefully create a real audience and inspire other teachers to incorporate similar practices in their teaching.

PLN Reflection

A short reflection on my developing educational technology and networking skills.