Staying Linked In

While other children were enrolled in sports, my mother enrolled my brother and me in various classes at our local community center.  As money became a problem later in our lives, my brother and I would have a collection of subject workbooks and a library card to keep us learning.  She hadn’t made the best grades in school, and I think she was determined that her children would be “smarter” (I use this term loosely) than she was.

We took classes on art, science, and math, but one summer, we took a computer class.  If I said this to my traditional students, they would automatically think of the technology they have: laptops, wifi, Microsoft, iPods.  In fact, on in-class work days with my dual enrollment students, they would always tell me they couldn’t work if their computer wasn’t functioning.  And when I’d ask about writing notes by hand, I’d get a blank stare and a “Well, yeahhhh ….” response.

I forget how much ease there is with technology and each new set of students.  When I first worked with computers, I had dot matrix printers, and my computer screen was severely limited:

Look at that black and green beauty.  Oh, and the wonderful, bulky font.  This was the idea of computers that I first started working with (and my “Oregon Trail” attempts always ended in dysentery or a continued inability to ford the river).  Newer generations of “Oregon Trail” players have a completely different product to work with that is a whole lot cooler than mine ever was.

Even years later, while taking an educational technology course as an undergraduate, I was using HyperStudio — a product my then-boyfriend who was a total computer geek had never heard of.  And there were only three years separating him and I, but that small amount of time created a huge technological gulf in our learning.

Better Tech Means Better Connectivity

With the increased technology and connected-ness, I have to remind myself what my students will come to me with.  In 2006, several magazines started talking about “The MySpace Generation” (although MySpace slowly lost popularity to Facebook and CNN just recently posted a piece that Twitter is becoming the new Facebook), the children who are so familiar with technology because it has always been a part of their lives, and not just any technology but fast, efficient, and immediate technology.

I’ll even get caught up in it. I will text rather than make a phone call.  I can’t tell you the last time I sent a letter through a post office.  I’ll type my class notes rather than write.  And what did I ever do without a phone that could connect me to Google, Facebook, and WordPress?  It seems like so long ago, but in reality there was a time that I avoided mobile phones because I didn’t want an electronic leash — and now here I am attached to Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and I can access all of these from my phone.

Open-Source Learning Means No More Excuses

Early in his presentation, Richard Baraniuk refers to open-source learning as being your own educational DJ — I love that wording! — but what I really enjoyed about his ideas is the underlying principle of collaboration and immediate availability (rhetorical velocity, much?).  His open-source education resource (Connexions) gives anyone, anywhere access to information.

As long as someone has access to a computer and internet, they can dig into whatever is there, whatever they’re interested in.  The site is open to authors, teachers, and students which speaks to me of the connectivity of our current world (how often do we hear “global community”?).  Technology has advanced to a place where we can all be linked in, the extent of which is defined by us.

We are in charge of what we want to learn, and as an educator, I am in charge of expanding my knowledge of teaching.  Open-source learning eliminates any excuses I may have about doing something the old way.  And because this information is literally at my fingertips, there’s no reason I couldn’t explore and try.

Neil Gaiman Helps Me Understand

Neil Gaiman makes a great point at the end of this YouTube video about the web giving us access to more information, and I think that is at the heart of open-source materials: We want to get material into people’s hands.  I was particularly fond of the way he explained the idea within a context I could understand — being lent a book.  I’m from a generation of people who are used to thinking in terms of tangible product (holding a book in my hand), so concepts like open-resource overwhelm me when I start thinking about everything involved.

But I’m a devoted Neil Gaiman follower because I was lent a copy of his American Gods (he refers to this book in the video) and I fell in love.  I buy everything he writes — even if it’s just a foreword for someone else’s work.  See:

And I’m in love with his writing because someone shared it with me — and isn’t that what open-source material is about: sharing with people so that they can grow and learn?  I realize that there are dangers in an open-resource world, but what about those moments that pay off?  Gaiman mentions that his sales increased after giving away his writing for free, and his story isn’t a singular entry in this tale of free material.

In 2008, recording artist Lil’ Wayne officially released his album “Tha Carter III” (I was in line for it the week it came out), and it made history.  It was the first album since 2005 to sell 1 million copies in the first week.  And many people argued that it was so successful because Lil’ Wayne gave his fans a bunch of free music while they waited for his official album.

Open-source may require us to rethink publishing, but it isn’t a death knell for a hard copy.

Just Keep Swimming

Whenever I have a long project to work on, I find myself thinking of Dory from Finding Nemo.  And then I beginning singing, humming, moving, and/or some embarrassing combination of all of those that I need to “just keep swimming.”

Of course, I won’t be literally swimming (although I imagine that to be a ridiculous scene that may give me some stress relief).  But the song is a reminder that I just have to keep going, and I got that same feel from Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk about creativity.  She offered up several thoughts about creativity, but it was her closing idea that struck me most.

“Just do your job.  Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that may be.  If your job is to dance, do your dance.  If the divine, cock-eyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment through your efforts, then Olé!  And if not, do your dance anyhow, and Olé! to you nonetheless.  I believe this, and I feel like we must teach it: Olé! to you nonetheless for just having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.”

And I think that’s the same thing Sir Ken Robinson hit on when he mentioned that we need to be willing to try so that we can come up with something original.  Creativity doesn’t have a right answer, but it gets us thinking.

We have no guarantees that our creative ventures will succeed, but we have no guarantees that they will fail either.  The important thing for cultivating creativity and not being overwhelmed with pressure is to remember that we need to keep trying (or keep swimming).

We need to think creative, and we need to write creative.  Or maybe we need to be creative about how we write?

Wrong Answers, Dance Movements, and Learning

One of my favorite extra-curricular activities in middle school and high school was the Odyssey of the Mind program.  We had to be creative and spontaneous, but we were also required to think critically.  The mantra we always said to ourselves was “think outside of the box.” We were rewarded for creativity.

When I first joined the program, I was challenged.  If you asked me to recall facts or even apply information, I could do that — I had been trained to do that — but training myself to be creative with my answers required a little more work.  I was afraid of being wrong, except O.M. (that’s what we called it for short) taught me that getting to a solution takes several attempts, and sometimes, there can be more than one right answer.

I think that’s what Sir Ken Robinson was getting at with his presentation “Schools Kill Creativity”: people need to move toward a model of thinking that doesn’t penalize attempts or make students think there is only one right answer all of the time.

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.  If you’re not prepared to be wrong.”

Any teacher who has tried to be creative in the classroom will often hit a wall of student reactions that want to know the right answer, or how the activity fits with the ACT, or worse, how it helps the AYP (how did this knowledge become a part of student vocabulary?!?).  We’re training students to never want to be wrong, and in doing so we’re teaching them to never try.  The penalties for getting the wrong answer are too severe, or at least they seem to be.

It worries me that students know what Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) is.  This tells me what it has become such a part of our culture that our students know the pressure of graduation rates and high-stakes testing.  And they aren’t learning to learn; they’re learning to pass a test.  They want to know the right answer because that is all that matters, all that will get them through the test, all that will get them through high school.  And we’re telling them that this is the case.

I’m not so idealist that I think a fully Progressive style of education works.  But why aren’t we trying to find a balance between learning federally-mandated subjects and putting a creative spin on assignments?

“There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics.  Why?  Why not?”

In the spring of 2011, I observed an acting movement master class offered by Theatre AUM.  I had a really long break between classes and had the time to spare to see what it was about.

I’m glad I went.

As I watched the students warm up and laugh, the woman in charge of the session explained the purpose of the class — they were going to experiment with the idea that movement helps line delivery as well as learning the lines.  If the students could perform a movement with the lines, then the process of becoming a character would become easier.

So they got into a circle and had to introduce themselves by first name and a movement.  But the game required that the person introducing himself/herself would have to repeat the name AND movement of the person/people who had come before and then introduce himself/herself.  I have seen games like this played in different variations, but never with the same ease.

Admittedly, the name part of the game would have been easy because most of the people in the circle knew each other, but the addition of the movement made me wonder: would movement help people remember?

And that night I was willing to try it out.

My poor Comp II students (I doubt they ever expected to get up and move in an English class) got the first taste of incorporating dance with rhetoric.  I don’t think that Aristotelian Appeals are incredibly complicated — there’s only three after all — but every semester, students would always get confused which appeal had to do with emotions or credibility or factual information.  And I was already trying to figure out how to better help them remember, so the idea came at a good time.

That night, my students got into two groups and came up with movements for each of the appeals.  And from that point on, they would have to perform the dance whenever I said the word (and I would stop class to make sure they did).  They didn’t forget the appeals after that.

What happened with my class is an example of the blending that I think can happen in a classroom, a blending that hits on quantitative goals (they could accurately define the terms) as well as something creative and more difficult to quantify.  The best part of the whole experiment was that it got my students laughing and shook off some of the pretense that English is just stuffy and all about writing.

That’s what Robinson is pushing for here — creativity for our students, but also for educators to find it in approach.  I think if we’re to expect creativity from students, we first need to model it for them, especially when they probably came from an environment that didn’t encourage it.