Telling Grandma about IMg

TidBITS#861/08-Jan-07

Younger Than Thou: Instant Messaging

  by Dan Pourhadi <pourhadi@gmail.com>

[Adam here. I recently turned 39, and as much as I don’t feel old physically, there are times when reading about how teenagers use technology – the stuff I’ve been writing about for 17 years! – make me feel simply ancient. Oh, I understand how the technology works; I just don’t always get why these people – all of whom are much younger than I am – find it so compelling, to the point where a recent study found that teens use electronic media for more than 72 hours per week. I don’t think I spend 72 hours per week doing anything short of breathing.

Rather than curmudgeonly harumph around about the good old days of scouring BITNET for joke files and extracting 400K floppies from Mac Pluses, I’ve instead recruited an actual teenager, college freshman Dan Pourhadi, to write about how and why teenagers use the technology they do. Dan last wrote about choosing a Mac to take to college on a $2,000 budget, an assignment he carried off with aplomb, so I figured he was the perfect person to explain his generation to those of us who actually remember the Soviet Union and East Germany (see Beloit College’s Class of 2010 Mindset List for other facts about today’s college freshmen). To kick things off, I’ve asked Dan to explain instant messaging to his grandmother, but I’d like to open this sporadic column up to suggestions from you. If there’s something about how young people (we’re talking 15 to 25 here) use technology, send me or Dan a note and we’ll see what we can do.]

“Hi, Danny dear…”

Hey, Grandma!

“What are you doing there?”

Oh, nothing, Grandma. Just talking to my friends online.

“Hi, Danny’s friend! I’m his grandmother!”

No, no, Grandma. I’m instant messaging them. We’re not on the phone.

“Oh, you’re typing to him? Like the emails. Who are you talking to? That girl you introduced me to yesterday? She was nice.”

Yeah, Grandma. Her, and my friend Mike, and Kim, and Jennifer.

“You’re talking to all of them? Right now?”

Yep, we’re all having separate conversations. See, this is my buddy list on the left. That shows all of my friends who are at their computers right now. I can send messages to anyone I want, and they can respond and we can have a conversation right here in this window – it’s free and there’s no telephone or anything special needed. And I can talk to as many people as I want.

“That is amazing. But it seems kind of complicated.”

It’s a pretty great tool, really, once you get the hang of it. Imagine being able to talk to multiple people at once, while going about your other business. The more you IM, the better your typing becomes, and eventually typing messages becomes second nature – holding a conversation online feels nearly as natural as speaking on the phone.

“That’s crazy.”

Crazy, Grandma?

“Crazy. What if you want to show yourself as sad or happy? How can you know what the other person is thinking if you can’t see or hear them?”

Well, I’m sure that was first said about the telephone – how can you gauge emotion if you can’t see his or her face? Simple: contextual clues and talk patterns. If you upset someone on the phone, they’re likely to pause a few seconds before answering. Once you’re a phone-speaking veteran, understanding the tone of the conversation is simple.

The same applies to text-based instant messaging. When I’m talking to my friends, we use various techniques to relay feeling and tone through the conversation. Ellipsis can mean confusion or uncertainty; a fast typist who’s responding unusually slowly is probably unhappy; italics emphasize words or phrases; capital letters typically denote yelling or excitement. There are also the smiley faces that help broadcast a particular feeling.

“But how do you know they’re not lying? Someone could be lying about how they feel.”

Very true, Grandma, very true. And that happens a lot. But the more you talk to certain people, the better you’re able to understand their real tone. It’s hard to hide emotion, in any medium.

For example, I have a friend who unknowingly adds a period at the end of every message when she’s upset. Most folks I know don’t really use periods in instant messages (sentences are typically separated and sent in separate messages) – so when periods are used, they tend to have a special meaning.

Everything is manipulatable online. Take laughter: if you’re trying to show that you’re amused by something, you’ll typically type “lol” (short for “laugh out loud”). If something is funnier, you might type “hahaha.” The funnier it is, the more “ha”s you add. If something is freakin’ hilarious, you might go all out with a bold “HAHAHAHA.” Capital letters add emphasis, see?

Strategic use of speed, pauses, capital letters and italics, emoticons, punctuation, abbreviations, even word choice – an IM veteran reads and understands all of that to mean something, and that makes IM conversations as natural to them as anything else.

“Um, Danny…”

Yes, Grandma?

“Your friend sent something to you. Why aren’t you answering?”

See, that’s another great aspect of this whole thing: If you’re talking face-to-face or on the phone, you’re forced to answer right away. An IM conversation is completely controllable. You can pause a few seconds to think of an answer, type “brb” (be right back) and take a few minute break, or just a simple “g2g” (got to go) to high-tail it outta there. You tailor the conversation to your liking.

“That’s terrible!”

Why’s that, Grandma?

“It’s rude! Leaving someone like that, in the middle of a conversation. Imagine!”

Grandma, what’s rude on the phone or in person isn’t necessarily rude online.

IM vets tend to follow certain etiquette rules that make conversations manageable for both sides. You shouldn’t leave a conversation, for instance, without first saying “brb” or “g2g”; if you’re not at your computer or if you don’t want to respond to IMs, you put up an “Away” message – something that’s sent automatically when you receive a message, like “I’m away from my computer.” so your buddies know not to expect an answer.

When everyone follows those rules – which honestly are pretty common-sense – then rudeness is all but eliminated.

“That’s not so bad I guess. So what do you talk about?”

Gossip.

“Oh.”

I’m kidding, Grandma. We talk about anything and everything. School work, work work, regular friend stuff. As odd as it sounds, I tend to be more open talking online than I am in person. Sure, doctors may say “that’s not healthy,” to which I’d respond “YOU’RE not healthy!”, but really, instant messaging is a lot easier for people like me. You have those extra seconds to analyze what’s being said and to plan your response; you can still convey and judge emotion; you can scroll up to re-read what’s been said; there are no awkward silences or odd looks or funny noises accidentally coming from your mouth.

Looking at it from a conventional, face-to-face-talking-is-the-best perspective, it may seem insincere and fake – a tailored, analyzed conversation – and it probably is, a little. But it reduces the risk of misspeaking and miscommunication, and it promotes honesty by making a conversation a lot more comfortable.

“You’ve thought about this a lot, haven’t you?”

I have, Grandma.

“So you’re talking to four people right now?”

I am.

“Doesn’t that get confusing? Saying all those different things to different people?”

You’d think so, wouldn’t you? It’s a habitual thing, like driving. When a newbie driver gets behind the wheel, he’s blown away by all the different tasks he’s supposed to accomplish at once – keeping his eye on the road, measuring his speed, watching for signs and anticipating other cars’ behaviors. It seems impossible to the poor sap.

But the more you drive, the more each task becomes habit, the easier it all becomes. The very same concept applies to instant messaging: At first, managing even one discussion is a hassle. But the more you do it, the more you’re able to compartmentalize the conversations; you learn to take clues from context and previous messages to know where you left off. Before you know it, you’re having conversations with ten or more people at once without batting an eye.

There is always the case of the mis-sent Message, though. Happens all the time: someone clicks the wrong conversation and sends a message that was supposed to go to someone else. It’s not necessarily a result of confusion: just acting before thinking.

“I’d never be able to do so many things at once. How in the world do you get anything done?”

Well, that’s when the Away message comes in handy. If I have work to do or TV to watch (both of which share a spot on the priority List), I’ll put up an Away message, hinting that I’m busy, unable, or even just unwilling to talk. I might talk with one or two people, but the Away message keeps other people from IMing me and helps to prevent distraction. It all has to do with willpower: if IM gets distracting, you shut it off. It’s not really a new concept – you probably thought that Mom talking on the phone got in the way of her homework. The solution – shutting down the distraction – is the same.

“Yes, she spent way too much time on the phone when she should have been doing her homework. But this all seems pretty neat to me.”

It really is. And there are all sorts of other cool features of IMing that make it an addictive form of communication: you can send pictures and files to your buddies; you can have IM chat-room conversations with two or more people; you can stay connected with people all over the world for free; it takes very little effort to initiate or participate in a conversation, which is great for lazies like me; there’s always the comfort of privacy; and it has what I call the “iPod Appeal”: you can enjoy it without making it the center of your focus. It’s entirely possible to have a serious meaningful conversation in the background while doing other things.

Case in point: I’m talking to you right now, Grandma, while writing a paper and talking to four of my friends. I’m obviously focusing on our conversation the most, then the paper, and then I’m answering my friends whenever they send me something. It works amazingly well. Try doing that on the phone, or even in person. I bet you couldn’t.

“Nope. You kids and your ‘younger than thou’ attitudes.”

Wow, Grandma. That’d make a great name for a column.

“I’m sure. So what about that paper you claimed you were working on?”

Sorry Grandma, g2g.

“What?”

Auto-Response: I’m away from my computer right now.

RLC Brainstorm

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Pumped up about the possibility of an interdisciplinary RLC that brings undergraduates together across campus who have a social interest in schools and kids. Pumped up about the possibility of a RLC that comes together out of a common agreement between UVM and the Burlington schools. Pumped up about the possibility of UVM students learning about their responsibilities as citizens to the schools and to all children through direct action with schools and kids. Pumped up about the possibility of a group of students who might include a sociology major, an anthro. major, a forestry major, and an eled. major, working together as a team with a class at a school and following that class for a couple of years from one teacher to another. This idea is an idea grounded in a kind of reciprocal social interest. The benefactors are as much the UVM students as they are the students in the schools.

Here are the ideas.

Residential Learning Community

Idea collection

1- Grounding

Social interest

Developmental assets

2- Relationship with Burlington

Forged with principals

Ideas grown with teacher groups

3- Objectives

• Develop commitment to all kids

• Build an idea of responsible citizenship is with respect to public education

• Participate in interdisciplinary study

• See schools as places where important questions can be asked, investigated, and addressed with multiple solutions

• Do things with kids that will build kids

Self esteem

Achievement

Language

• to study what it is to become and ally

to recognize privilege

to learn how to use privilege

to become an ally

• to keep track of you own goals, growth, and projected development with repect to the catalyst program

• to conduct research. Present same at a regional or national venue.

4- Interdisciplinary inquiries

Question based

What are the forms of poverty

What relationships are there between the various forms and school achievement

Tracing the presence of social interest across various school groups

Climate surveys in the school

Who says what where

What is the public space

How is it used

Language

Behavior

Interactions

Social position

Status, power, authority

Resistance

5- Thematic based kid support systems

Bridge usual semester presence

Two year commitment?

Follow a group of kids through?

Connect outside as well as inside

Meet parents, create relationships

Possibilities

Art blast

Technowizards

world travelers-web explorations

muralists

tricksters

dancehoppers

broomballers

Drum Project

Odessey of the Mind

6- photoproject

large mural like bw photos of kids learning posted in public places in schools and perhaps even in display venues around town…firehouse. Competition? Kids create documentation around the photos. Use or purchase the huge printers plus several good cameras…8mgpxs or more.

7- Apple connection

Forge an agreement with apple corporation to supply the sixth grades at one school with apple computers and take responsibility for developing and monitoring the use of same. Or, supply uvm students with loaners for one year to develop projects with kids linked to school programs. Becoming expert in iLife. Several students take the lead. Get them to applecamp.

8- university aspiration building

tours

kids become university ambassadors in their own schools

researchers as in the FM mode

commitment to pursue education

meeting various persons of interest

9- possible names

The Catalyst coalition

My Doggy Zappa

doggy_10_06%20copy.jpg

Adult Perspective: All of a sudden she’s drawing representational figures.

Cianya’s Perspective: I’ve finally got the control of how to make these lines go where I want them to. This is Zappa, my doggy. I’ve even got those dark eyes exactly where I want them! (Cianya is just four years old. This picture was drawn perhaps two weeks into her fifth year on earth.)

Wil Richardson on Marco Torres

Marco Torres is the film maker that Martha Nichols wrote to me about. He is a brilliant teacher in LA and was hired by Apple to do a series of films with kids on schools where technology (iLife06) is change the way of learning life. The films are brilliant and brought multiple lumps to my throat. They show kids and teachers in stereotype-busting schools embracing inquiry and learning and having fun doing it.

When Martha wrote, I had no idea who Torres was and I indelicately wrote him and asked. Tonight, I find Wil Richardson’s blog on Torres speech last Spring at the K-12 Online Conference. I clearly have to learn more about this man’s work! Here’s his speech.

Marco Torres–”Quit, Complain, or Innovate”

So I had the distinct pleasure of getting a chance to chat on and off with Marco Torres the last few days and to watch and listen to his scintillating keynote yesterday. Let me be clear: there is no one “out there” right now who delivers the message about how schools need to change better than Marco. No one. He’s a teacher, a learner, a father, a visionary…I can’t say enough good things about him. And he just totally gets it in a way that we all have to get closer to.

His kids and his work are, I think, as close to the new story as we come. And it’s rooted, I think, in the way he looks at what he asks his kids to do. As he says, whatever it is that they create, “it must have wings.” As far as I can tell, there is no work for the teacher in his classroom. Instead, it’s work for the community. Work for the world. Real, purposeful stuff. So different from the way most of us look at our classrooms. And he does it in difficult circumstances. At his school of 5,000 kids, only about 650 graduated last year. Eighty percent of the state of California does better than his school. “Teachers can either quit, complain, or innovate.” Guess which he chooses.

Marco had his kids list all of the ways they have to receive, produce, share or broadcast information. The list, as you can imagine, is long. Then, he had his kids call school districts from around the country and ask for the age of the principal or the chief school administrator and they found the average age to be 48. Finally, he had them list the ways those administrators had to receive, produce, share or broadcast information when they were 16. The difference in the lists is telling, and the moral obvious. The world has changed drastically, and we just are not taking advantage of all of the other ways that we now have available to assess what our students are learning. Marco speaks with passion about finding a student’s “channel” for learning. He tells the story of asking a group of professors to write down the events that have had the biggest impact on their lives, and they wroted down things like the Vietnam, the Challenger accident, 9/11, all things that they had seen. Nothing that they had read. A lot of our kids know it by seeing it.

And, “learning is not just how you receive information but how you produce it.” He tells the story of how his Socail Studies department a few years ago took three weeks to decide that the appropriate number of pages for a research paper was 15 pages. That was frustrating, he says, because it’s all about process. “Work has to fly.” Then he showed this video, “The Power of One.” “If I passed out all the A papers,” he said, “it would not have had the same impact. Could the classroom be the stage for the world? It’s been a risk for me, but making sure that my target audience is not just my principal but instead the community and business makes it relevant.”

Some other ideas in short order:

* If you can be replaced, you will be. Creativity is what is going to set you apart.

* A lot of my teachers are like skiiers, they want smooth ride, no bumps, no ice. But if you change the perspective and become a snowboarder, bumps and ice can be an awesome ride. We need to be snowboarders.

* Make it relevant, make it meaningful, make it applicable.

* It’s all about your network. Who is in your “now” network?

* We need to connect students and family. We have to include them. (See this video as an example.)

* It’s not about technology. It’s about creativity, about a business plan. Are you aware of your target audiences? Who are you going to market to? How will you assess it?

It was just a great, great talk that has me motivated to want to learn more and more and more. Those are the best kind, I think.

Connecting Virtually: The Big Disconnect

This is going to be a bit of a roundabout. In this short essay, I make the point that computer mediated learning is “cool” learning. By “cool” I mean “devoid of felt connection.” I establish a research basis for this conclusion and end with a warning about cookies and baskets. Along the way, I celebrate the resolution of a thirty-year question in my mind.

When I was an intern in Syracuse University’s Urban Teacher Preparation Program (1964-65), I had to make sure any lesson/unit/curriculum I designed attended to three human needs: power, connection, and identity. If curriculum addressed these three needs as well as the “content” that needed to be addressed, then the learner would be “hooked.” Motivation, intrinsic motivation, the motivational desire to want to do something, motivation that comes from the heart and gut is tapped when these three needs are addressed. The intern group of which I was a part worked hard to write stuff that was relevant to our kids and relevancy was achieved by attending to power, identity, and connection.

For the record, to design lessons for power meant your lesson had to enhance a person’s ability to influence others (in positive ways) and to have increased control over self; to design lessons for identity meant your lesson had to enhance how a person felt about themselves and what they knew about themselves as a human being; and to design lessons for connection meant the lesson had to designed in such a way as to enable to person to see themselves as part of a larger world. Designing with these hooks in mind was intellectually challenging and forced us to continually try to see the world from the perspective of our kids.

“Connection” is the need I want to unpack here. The need to belong and to see yourself as an accepted part of a larger whole is central to the individual psychology of Alfred Adler. Adler, and later his colleague Rudolf Dreikurs, went on to develop the idea of social interest, the idea that we live our lives as part of many groups and part of our basic motivational structure is to enhance our group lives. We need to watch out for each other and we need for others to watch our for ourselves. Community, then, becomes something much more than a nice place to live. Community becomes a necessity for establishing and maintaining our basic mental and spiritual and physical well being. Adler, Driekurs, and others were suggesting to us that our emotional health was grounded in our social relationships. Driekurs was particularly dogmatic on the point that classroom teachers need to attend to the social emotional climate of our classrooms. Our number one task as teachers is to manipulate the social and academic structures in our rooms so that the relationships between and among our children and ourselves are supportive, challenging, and filled with opportunities for us to discover and live out who we are as unique individuals within unique group. To be en-couraged is to be filled with courage – the courage to be yourself, the courage to discover who you are among peers, the courage to know your power and identity through your connections with others. Pretty heady ideology, ideology born of an era that saw millions turned to ashes in the ovens of Hitler’s grand plan. Adler and Driekurs were both German Jews. I can imagine for them, their formulations about social interest were thoughts that held life and death meaning.

I spent over thirty years considering their views as ideology: theory, practice, theory and practice that worked in magical ways, by the way, when you watched Rudolph Driekurs work with kids and teachers. It was another German Jew, Kurt Lewin, who noted there was nothing so practical as a good theory.

Yesterday, I made a connection that tells me I no longer have to consider these ideas of social emotional connection and social interest and whole human beings as soft ideas, embedded in the clouded certainty of social science research. A chain of three events has brought me there.

Event One. My partner in crime in 1982 was Frank Watson. Sometime in 1982 or 1983, Frank brought the first <a href="Commodore Vic 20 to our Apex program. The Commodores were rapidly replaced by a bank of Apple 2e’s and soon, our interns, our teachers to be, were tapping out commands to move Seymour Papert’s turtles around a virtual space. I was at once, fascinated and repelled. I could see these early computers were more than virtual typewriters. Fifteen years before I’d read O. K. Moore’s research on establishing autotelic environments to help struggling urban readers learn to read. But were these newer versions of Moore’s huge vacuum tube computer going to replace cuisenaire rods and base-10 blocks and language experience as the vehicles to get young learners, learners who were suspicious of what schools could do for them, turned on to the power of their own brains? I thought not, but I was worried. In all these years, I have not been able to wrap my mind around the substance of my suspicion. There was something fundamentally different about mediating the learning of place value by manipulating virtual materials on a computer screen than there was by mediating the same learning by manipulating real blocks in a classroom! In short, learning with a computer was different than learning with what I called the real thing. And to be sure, I had strong opinions that it wasn’t as good, at least for children up to the age of say, twelve or thirteen. There was something essentially cool and disconnected in the tap tap tap of the keys that I didn’t like.

Event Two. During my sabbatical research last year, I came upon two articles authored by a crew of researchers at Duke University who had the capacity to dig deeply into the structures of how we think and feel, virtually. Their work establishes the physiological reality of emotional memory. I remember re-reading these two articles over and over and saying to myself, that’s it. Adler, Driekurs, and all the other educators who knew how important it was to teach children as if they were whole thinking, feeling, emoting, running, playing people now had physiological proof of their ideology. Their ideas were not longer ideological invocations, they were simply good practice grounded in what we know about the way we are hard wired. The Duke researchers establish the circularity of thought and feeling because they have been able to trace the actual neurological connection between raw feeling and the interpretation and meta-processing of feeling. Thinking, feeling, behaving are connected now more than just by logic. They actually are connected in the circuitry of our mental processing. Now I knew that what I believed was not only right, it was also true. How important is the evidence condition to knowing? Very. At least to Israel Scheffler (1965), and to me. [Reference: Conditions of Knowledge.]

Episode Three. Gavin is one of my students in my current directions course, a two week intensive we are currently in the midst of. In his project, Gavin is struggling with a dilemma that approximates the dilemma I had when those Commodore 64s arrived in the Apex room in 1982. Although Gavin is coming at the issue a bit differently. Gavin is as personally connected to “community” as I was to base-10 blocks in 1982 and Gavin is sensing a threat to what he believes is central about one’s actual experience and membership and participation in community. He’s worried that people will equate the virtual communities so easily attained through a keyboard and the internet with the real communities that are so basic and necessary to him. Basic and necessary. Human beings need community, they need to belong and feel belongingness. Gavin and I are coming from the same place on that one. So how, we were discussing, does the virtual community experience differ from an experience of actual community? And as part of that discussion, we’d also talked about virtual warfare, the capacity of male human beings to kill, maim, torture, and do awful things to each other. We’d talked about kids, kids from conditions of generational poverty and their inability to show any real kind of social interest beyond defending themselves in the most physical of ways, and what was the influence of mediated environments on all this. How did the continual viewing of television as babysitter, how did viewing the news night after night with its images of car bombs, dismembered human beings, people running from mortar attacks, sobbing women in burkas, how were all these things connected to the fact that lots of kids simply can’t feel much empathy for their fellow human beings?

Snap! It all came together. THe commodores, the base ten blocks, Alfred Adler, Rudolph Driekurs, the classrooms full of kids who hit and yell and scream at teachers, the inability to empathize, the experience of tap tap tap communities on a cold computer screen – they all come together for me now. Here’s what I think. In our face to face experience of community – five people sitting or standing close to each other talking, arguing, listening, laughing, crying, whatever – our emotional systems are activated and processing every single moment of that interaction. I think the mere fact of being that close, physical proximity, sets the amygdala pulsing. Being with each other in real time is an emotionally mediated event. We are whole. The Duke research shows the emotional memory loop for every interaction we have. It shows that the ones that register strongly are the ones we remember and how we remember them is important. Merely by being in a situation, we can “get a feeling” that sets us on call for what is about to happen even if we don’t remember what it was that happened that caused the feeling. Or, we can be in a situation that triggers the feelings of another similar situation. Messages are running back and forth between the seat of emotions and the processing centers for emotion all the time and it makes no difference where the stimulus comes from. Being in the real live situation is a thinking feeling moment.

I doubt the same is true for the mediated computer environment. I don’t think the amygdala is triggered in the same way. The “distance” of the virtual world insulates us from having to feel and although the repetition of “bad things” opens up a whole other area to talk about – the area of desensitization to horrible events – I think the computer world exacts a multiplier effect on our numbed experience. In other words, virtual communities are literally felt differently because they are mediated. I’m suggesting they are more an experience of pure thought, an experience at once distanced and disconnected from our emotional processing centers. The computer world by itself is a disconnect. And perhaps, the computer world as a disconnecting medium of experience has to be reconsidered as a teaching tool.

So Gavin, thank you. I think you are on to something here and I’ll look forward to learn where you take our conversation. For me, a thirty year question has achieved some resolution and of course, will lead to new questions and considerations. Just in case you want to use these ruminations as a diatribe against computers, don’t! Life is an aptitude-treatment-interaction, so you know I’m gonna say computers somewhere, with some kids, for some purpose, in some situations, you couldn’t get a better tool. But as the medium through which we achieve our learnings about life? I think not. Absolutely not.

Shared WebSite, continued.

Assessment Issues from the shared space.

Human Issues:

What I’m seeing is more variety now among the six, relative to being able to use the site beyond simple things:

Simple – being able to click and drag, placing the cursor efficiently and successfully, loading the right browser, smoothly getting the url entered, signing in, moving around the site.

Moderate Complexity – editing print on a page, adding a link/making a page that’s yours, adding information to a page, cooperative.

Complex – editing someone else’s writing, adding links to external sites, adding links to sites within the wikispace, adding images, collaborative.

Infrastructure Issues:

1. VPN kicks off way too fast. There were probably twenty instances over two and a half hours that the VPN protocol turned off. This is very disruptuve to the momentum of almost any kind of directed instructional experience. You have to stop, wait, or face the choice of leaving someone behind as you go forward.

2. Add to this that some individuals are at the simple level of complexity meanss the momentum slows down even more as they get their sites up and running once again.

3. Batteries begin to die after 2.5 hours.

Helpful knowledge/skills to have.

1. clicking and dragging

2. create multiple tabs so you can click back and forth from a website to the wikispace – especially helpful when you are finding urls to create external links

Observations of how good things have become.

1. most get on the site automatically

2. the computers work fine with the exception of the vpn kicking off.

3. people are finding their way around the site exceptionally well.

4. people use each other quite effectively.

5. people cooperate quite well with each other – the talk that is “in the air” creates conditions of informal support across and around the table

Possible To Dos?

1. have a sheet of paper on the table so every person can reach it. Ask them to place a √mark in a column for every time vpn times out.

2. structure an exercise in which people have to edit each other’s work.

3. ask them what we want / need to keep track of

Moving Into The Read/Write Web

I have the incredible opportunity to be teaching a class of six students right now. Six. I’ve never taught a class of six students. And having just come out of an intense EdPsych Seminar with 18 students, I wanted to try something a little different. I’ve been reading Will Richardson’s Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classroom – or perhaps the better words are “playing with” Will’s book, I’ve been wanting to use a shared website. Never done it before.

I love the idea of sharing the intellectual space with students in such an obvious way, and of forcing them to deal with each other (and me) in this very real tangible letter-by-letter collaboration. So I selected wikispace as the program to use after finding out the the original program I had selected was going to take five days to get approval. Hmmm. Five days would have taken me into the second day of the course. No thank you. I wanted to dive in day one. And dive in I did.

We seven are a varied lot. No one, myself included, super sophisticated in terms of tech expertise. Some still trying to figure out the click-and-drag thing. But we took it slow, everyone had an iBook, we hauled tables into the room from another class so we could sit around a table face to face, and I started to take them through the course using a projector and then had them put themselves into the course by interviewing each other, writing up the interviews, and uploading the text. The last half hour was spent talking about the “current directions” we were going to be interested in and I think we are “off” in terms of finding a topic of interest. Now tomorrow, I’d love to get at least one or two pairs of students to work together on a trend or at least to create one page for two closely associated trends. We’ll see.

What have I learned so far.

1. start simple – demonstrate all, assume nothing.

2. build a way into the first moments of the course for students to get in, write, and publish

3. build a way into the first moments of the course for students to edit someone else’s work (in this case, someone else’s writing of an interview with you)

4. be aware of students who have limited access and have paper backup

5. constantly monitor if the technology is driving or serving the daily outcomes – my goal is to serve, not drive

6. I don’t have to know it all. Hmm, where have I heard this before.

What I need to get better at.

1. putting myself out there in terms of being one of the content providers

2. provoking discussion

3. immediate feedback to students

Complex Instruction PodCast / KWL from Class

My Seniors are getting ready to implement a complicated Complex Instruction cooperative learning rotation in their classrooms. Part of our preparation was to focus their panic in a KWL we did in class last week. I offer this podcast as one way of responding to their questions. It’s corny, but perhaps informative.

These are most of the “What I want to know about what I’m about to do with CI” questions I responded to in the Cast:

W – “What I want to know about what I’m about to do with CI.”

1. If a group of students just aren’t working well together, is it okay to switch them?

2. For resource card, can I use a non-fiction book?

3. For the pre/post test should we measure knowledge of content or multiple abilities?

4. What do you do with the activities/projects that are finished each day? Do the kids present them during the closing meeting?

5. Can I give a first grader two roes?

6. Will four different activities on food from around the world be too narrow?

7. How do I describe the role of facilitator to very young students so they do not find it unfair that this person is a type of leader? Perhaps they won’t have a problem with it.

8. I want to know more about getting slower processors and lower academic students involved.

9. How can I encourage students to work as a team so everyone is as engaged as possible?

10. Are there ever and groups of students that do not benefit from ci?

11. How often would it be beneficial to do CI? If it occurs once a week, do the benefits not become as strong because it is done so often?

12. I want to know how to create an effective pre/post test for ci.

13. How should I organize the groups? What roles?

14. How much time for sharing?

15. How is sharing structured?

16. How much preparation with roles and norms? How far in advance?

17. How do I incorporate and deal with team teaching?

18. How do I fix / prevent behavioral problems curing CI stations?

19. Many students don’t get along, groups are made as friendly as possible yet issues will arise. Pre/post tests?

PodCast CIDownload file

Thinking about teaching…

I’ve been reading a fascinating book recently called Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts by Will RIchardson, a California secondary educator. More than any other source of inspiration, this book, with all its inherent resources – site listings, wiki listings, etc. has really got me thinking about my teaching. Never satisfied, I look for new ways to involve the students. Not really to “get them involved,’ but ways to set up my teaching space so they become – want to become – involved. Not since the days of hands-on math investigations, outdoor thematic learning, ESS, Math Their Way, etc. have I been so interested in transforming my teaching. Thank you, Will. More on this later, I’m sure.

I think of this mainly with my 8am first year students. They are great people, every one of them. As my relationships with individuals begin to dip a bit below the surface, I appreciate them more and more and I feel privileged to be their teacher. They show up, at 8am, two days a week, waiting to learn. Waiting for me to teach them. And damn, I fall in to the trap every semester. They are waiting for me! I am working way more than they are. That’s not the way it should be. It’s transmission. And I want transformation. I want THEM to see the way things could be and to learn how to get their own kids actively connected and involved with their own questions. I can provide the parameters, but they have to do the digging, the exposing, the thinking, the reflecting. Why do I have to rediscover this again and again. It’s only when i get so uncomfortable with the level of my own spoonfeeding, enticing, salesmanship, that I finally hit the way and realize that what I see of them as learners through my window is but a mirror of my own making.

For the moment, I wanted to show you a really funny satire that i found as a result of surfing the NYC Collaborative Writing wiki. The site is a student writing about a new terrorist group called al-gebra.

( ;-))