pathways | an educator's notebook

It's been some time since I last posted a new song. Here's one that's been fighting for my attention for the last little while; I managed to put the final touches to it late last week. Inspired by my two years in Saskatchewan, this track has a light, open, and somewhat melancholic feel, much like that engendered by the humbling prairie skies and landscape.

Prairie [3:57]

Redux | February 23, 2007: Alrighty. I usually steer clear of myself on this blog, but I've been blog-tagged with the "five things" meme by my friend Sophia and couldn't resist. So here goes:

1. When I play a musical instrument, I "see" notes as colours: A = white; B = orange/brown; C = yellow; D = blue; E = red; F = brown; G = green. Sharps and flats are different intensities of their "parent" colour; for the musicians out there, I read sharps/flats as Ab, Bb, C#, Eb, F#. I was never taught this and have no idea how common this is.

2. I enjoy being creeped out. This can manifest in a variety of ways: film, music, visual art, literature, or the occasional feeling of déjà vu. I draw the line at food, however.

3. I'm a student of Theravada Buddhism.

4. I am attracted to wide, open spaces, and have a desire to ride the rails across the North American prairies.

5. My career has been, and continues to be, devoted to water, but I've never learned to swim.

Rather than tag five other bloggers (which suggests a chain letter, which isn't my style), I'm issuing an open invitation to any who also wish to navel-gaze. The comments are yours, brother and sisters.

This post by Will Richardson, which has generated a lot of discussion, lays out a manifesto for "unlearning", or seeing things differently. Here are Will's original statements (read the "comments" to the post for additional ideas):
 

• We need to unlearn the idea that we are the sole content experts in the classroom, because we can now connect our kids to people who know far more than we do about the material we’re teaching.

• We need to unlearn the premise that we know more than our kids, because in many cases, they can now be our teachers as well.

• We need to unlearn the idea that learning itself is an event. In this day and age, it is a continual process.

• We need to unlearn the strategy that collaborative work inside the classroom is enough and understand that cooperating with students from around the globe can teach relevant and powerful negotiation and team-building skills.

• We need to unlearn the idea that every student needs to learn the same content when really what they need to learn is how to self-direct their own learning.

• We need to unlearn the notion that our students don’t need to see and understand how we ourselves learn.

• We need to unlearn our fear of putting ourselves and our students “out there” for we’ve proven we can do it in safe, relevant and effective ways.

• We need to unlearn the practice that teaches all students at the same pace. Is it any wonder why so many of our students love to play online games where they move forward at their own pace?

• We need to unlearn the idea that we can teach our students to be literate in this world by continually blocking and filtering access to the sites and experiences they need our help to navigate.

• We need to unlearn the premise that real change can happen just by rethinking what happens inside the school walls and understand that education is now a community undertaking on many different levels.

Redux | February 9, 2007: Reporting from the Technology, Reading & Learning Diversity Conference, Anne Davis reflects on giving language to the process of comprehension; by defining and describing the process, students can better understand how best to develop their comprehension strategy. She writes:
 

• When you are deeply engaged the world around you disappears.

• We dwell in ideas. We need time to be silent, to listen to our own thinking to reflect purposefully on an idea.

• How much time do we give students? We have to give them time.

• Understanding does not happen unless we give them time to think deeply. We have to give them time.

• Students need a way to hold on to their thinking.

• We understand when we struggle because we so want to know.

• Talk is hugely important to the learning process.

• To understand is to remember because it is important for us to remember — need those emotional connections.

• Rigorous discourse with others.

• We are renaissance learners — we allow ourselves to meander through a wide range of topics and understand texts and generalize.

• We work to understand how ideas are related.

When we understand:

• We concentrate intensively — we are fervent, we lose ourselves in the experience of thought, we work intensively, the world disappears and we work hard to learn more, we choose to challenge ourselves.

In order to make the dimensions of understanding come alive, teachers should:
 

• Model — This translates into you sharing with your students about times you were intensely involved with learning and what triggered you to push those understandings further. Share the details. Did you happen to be studying something at the time that was an area in which you were passionately interested? What made you want to dig deeper? Did it lead you to more understandings?

• Talk about how to develop areas of passionate interest. Such passions don’t come automatically to all kids. Talk to your kids in individual and group meetings to help kids find areas that most interest them. Talk with them about how to pursue topics of passionate interest. How do you do it in your own life — how might they do it?

In a companion post, Anne describes strategies for making this dimension come alive in the classroom:
 

• Set aside some chunks of class time for focused, silent work in which students can concentrate on more deeply understanding one idea – when they have time to listen to themselves think and consider subtleties rather than rushing to memorize the next thing.

• Model how proficient readers frequently re-read and re-think portions of text – kids often think that re-reading means starting at the beginning and re-reading everything – show them how readers pick and choose among the portions of text they choose to explore more deeply.

• Teach kids about meta-cognition – thinking about one’s own thinking – and the seven most common meta-cognitive strategies.

Here’s a list of those strategies:

• Connecting the known to the new.

• Determining importance, learning the essence of text.

• Questioning, delving deeper into meaning.

• Using sensory images to enhance comprehension.

• Inferring, finding the intersection of meaning.

• Synthesizing, discovering the contour and substance of meaning.

• Solving reading problems Independently, empowering children to move from problem to resolution.

Anne repeatedly mentions the importance of finding/allowing time to listen to our thinking and to reflect on ideas, a concern that Dave Pollard comments on in this recent post.

Consider this a companion piece to Tree art (and see also my storytelling post); writing in UBC's Terry, Randi Neff poses some questions to a Hemlock, and receives some enlightened responses.

From the Whiskey River blog:
 

One does not become enlightened by imagining light, but by making the darkness conscious.

—C. G. Jung

Redux | December 21, 2006: ...was "vituperate". Thanks, guys!

Confabb combines an aggregate database of major conferences, conventions, and trade shows sorted by industry with social networking tools designed to empower conference attendees to improve their overall experience. Built into the site is a reputation management system to be used by conference attendees, speakers, organizers, and administrators allowing people to plan for and attend conferences, and critique and review those they have attended and want to share with colleagues. It aims to provide a comprehensive listing of events with a robust tool set for maximizing the conference experience via the live Web.

Ignorance, arrogance, narrowness of mind, incomplete knowledge and counterfeit knowledge are of concern to us because they are dangerous; when united with great power, they cause great destruction.

The above is a quote by Wendell Berry from his collection of essays, "The Way of Ignorance". He goes on to say:
 

Our damages to watersheds and ecosystems will have to be corrected one farm, one forest, one acre at a time. The aftermath of a bombing has to be dealt with one corpse, one wound at a time [...] If we find the consequences of our arrogant ignorance to be humbling, and we are humbled, then we have the first fact of hope: We can change ourselves. We, each of us severally, can remove our minds from the corporate ignorance and arrogance that is leading the world to destruction.

In his essay, The Idea of a Local Economy, Berry presents his understanding of the assumptions made by the free market, or total, economy:
 

1. That stable and preserving relationships among people, places, and things do not matter and are of no worth.

2. That cultures and religions have no legitimate practical or economic concerns.

3. That there is no conflict between the "free market" and political freedom, and no connection between political democracy and economic democracy.

4. That there can be no conflict between economic advantage and economic justice.

5. That there is no conflict between greed and ecological or bodily health.

6. That there is no conflict between self-interest and public service.

7. That the loss or destruction of the capacity anywhere to produce necessary goods does not matter and involves no cost.

8. That it is all right for a nation's or a region's subsistence to be foreign based, dependent on long-distance transport, and entirely controlled by corporations.

9. That, therefore, wars over commodities — our recent Gulf War, for example — are legitimate and permanent economic functions.

10. That this sort of sanctioned violence is justified also by the predominance of centralized systems of production supply, communications, and transportation, which are extremely vulnerable not only to acts of war between nations, but also to sabotage and terrorism.

11. That it is all right for poor people in poor countries to work at poor wages to produce goods for export to affluent people in rich countries.

12. That there is no danger and no cost in the proliferation of exotic pests, weeds, and diseases that accompany international trade and that increase with the volume of trade.

13. That an economy is a machine, of which people are merely the interchangeable parts. One has no choice but to do the work (if any) that the economy prescribes, and to accept the prescribed wage.

14. That, therefore, vocation is a dead issue. One does not do the work that one chooses to do because one is called to it by Heaven or by one's natural or god-given abilities, but does instead the work that is determined and imposed by the economy. Any work is all right as long as one gets paid for it.

The importance of knowledge and its effective communication — in terms of the simple sharing of facts, skills development, or the changing of established behaviours, in both actual and virtual environments — is a topic I've focussed on before in this blog. In "The Way of Ignorance", Berry presents his "taxonomy" of the types of human ignorance and knowledge:
 

Varieties of ignorance —

Inherent ignorance: Ignorance that stems from the limitations of the human brain.

Ignorance of history: Due to our unawareness of what we have forgotten, and never learned.

Materialist ignorance: Wilful refusal to recognize what cannot be empirically proved (narrow-mindedness).

Moral ignorance: Wilful refusal to come to a moral conclusion on the basis it may not be 'objective'.

Polymathic ignorance: The false confidence of knowledge of the past and future.

Self-righteous ignorance: Ignorance arising from our failure to know ourselves and our weaknesses.

Fearful ignorance: Stemming from the lack of courage to believe and accept knowledge that is unpopular, unpleasant or tragic.

Lazy ignorance: Stemming from not being willing to make the effort to understand what is complex.

For-profit and for-power ignorance: Deliberate obscuring or withholding of knowledge (e.g. advertising, propaganda).

Varieties of knowledge —

Empirical knowledge: That which can be empirically proved to be true or factual.

Experiential knowledge: That which comes from personal experience.

Traditional 'common' knowledge: The collective experiential knowledge of a community or culture, handed down, by those who have lived in the same place for a long time.

Religious knowledge: Those who premise the falsehood of such knowledge of course don't have it and their opinion of it is worthless.

Instinctive and intuitive knowledge: That which need not be learned, which is known without the need for proof.

Conscience or moral knowledge: The knowledge of the difference between right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate behaviours.

Inspiration and imagination: Knowledge that comes from sources that cannot be empirically located.

Sympathy and affection: The intimate knowledge of others that comes by relating to and connecting with them.

Bodily knowledge: The ability to apply skillfully what is conceptually known.

Counterfeit knowledge: Falsehoods that are known to be such but are nonetheless plausible.

Related to this taxonomy and to an earlier post, George Siemens presents his knowledge/learning "principles of connectivism" in his book Knowing Knowledge:
 

• Learning and knowledge require diversity of opinions to present the whole and to permit selection of best approach.

• Learning is a network-formation process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.

• Knowledge rests in networks.

• Knowledge may reside in non-human appliances, and learning is enabled/facilitated by technology.

• Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known.

• Learning and knowing are constant, on-going processes (not end states or products).

• Ability to see connections and recognize patterns and make sense between fields, ideas, and concepts is the core skill for individuals today.

• Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.

• Decision-making is learning. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality.

• While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.

Given the consequences of ignorance or Berry's "counterfeit knowledge", it is important, then, that people get it. One of the most succinct approaches I've found — and one which I've utilized when trying to foster awareness and stimulate response to environmental issues in communities — is Dave Pollard's post on How To Change Hearts, Minds & Behaviours. Of course, the sharing of knowledge is only the first step. And even then, as Pollard has commented repeatedly:
 

We do what we must, then we do what's easy, and then we do what's fun.

And finally, a consideration from George Siemens:
 

We seem to feel that it is our structuring of knowledge that gives birth to learning, not the innate curiosity and aptitude for learning. In a sense, we believe students will not arrive at "c" if they don't first go through "a" and "b". This may be true in certain instances, but there are times where "a" and "b" are acquired in the doing of "c". It's contextual (as always). I've had times in my life where I would have appreciated theoretical background before moving to action. Other times, the theory was an impediment. It's difficult to frame learning too precisely without consideration of context.

Vyew is a free, always-on collaboration and web conferencing site that allows individuals real-time desktop sharing and capturing. Check it out here. Also, if you're familiar with elluminate, the recent offering of vRoom will be a welcome development. Although free, online interactivity is currently only supported for up to three people.