THE SURPRISING TRUTH...about what motivates us

Dan Pink on what truly motivates us in the work that we do: ideas that we likely already know, but that are oh-so-easy to lose sight of.

Summer Time...and the Livin' Is Easy: A Timely Look at the History of Summer Vacation

A recent NPR-sponsored report takes a look at the history of the summer vacation in the context of school schedules--with a focus on current happenings in Ohio.

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Banned Kurt Vonnegut Book to be Read by Band of High School Students

The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library is offering 150 free copies of Slaughterhouse-Five to students of the Missouri school that recently banned the seminal 20th Century novel.

Three Books for the Grammar Lover In Your Life

A recent NPR review.

Why I Need My High School Library

Take a look at this award-winning video--student-created!

LMSs as tools, not revolutions

reflections on Esther Shein's "One-Stop Shopping With Learning Management Systems."

In her article, “One-Stop Shopping With Learning Management Systems,” Shein quotes Matthew Waymack, a virtual school director in Georgia: "The climate of the classrooms is better," he says, "the attendance of the students and teachers is better, and the overall feeling of being engaged is better." Waymack, of course, is referring to his school’s use of a learning management system, or LMS. Waymack is part of a new group of educators who, ten years ago, seemed to be light years ahead of the educational curve with visions of what online learning could look like. In the year 2001, my thoughts around any kind of non-lecture courses were something like this: “Correspondence courses? Sure: do some readings, do some writings, mail papers back to an instructor via the post. But online courses? Too problematic. Not really happening.”

Now, in 2011, I am recalling a decade-old idea of the insurmountable complexities around online learning...on my blog, which is itself a tool for online sharing and learning.

Waymack’s above quotation catches my eye because it embodies the highest ideal that might be represented by online learning: the notion that technology and strictly virtual realms of learning do not take the place of traditional learning scenarios, but that—rather—there is the possibility that with the aid of tools like LMSs, we might simply take moderate steps toward achieving better classroom climates, better attendance, and better overall engagement.

I can’t imagine any teacher—tech-savvy or not—balking at those aims.

Podcasts for the Classroom (Classcasts?)

A collection of some of my favorite podcasts with applications to the secondary school language and literature classroom:

GRAMMAR GIRL'S QUICK AND DIRTY TIPS FOR BETTER WRITING

"In under five minutes, you'll get a fun and friendly dose of writing advice. Grammar Girl covers everything from punctuation and grammar to style and voice."

http://grammar.qdnow.beta.libsynpro.com/rss


THE MOTH

"The Moth features people telling true, engaging, funny, touching and eye-opening stories from their lives."

http://feeds.feedburner.com/themothpodcast


NPR's STORYCORPS

"At recording booths across America, everyday people interview one another about their lives. StoryCorps creator Dave Isay showcases these first-person stories in this weekly podcast."

http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510200


THIS AMERICAN LIFE

"Official free, weekly podcast of the award-winning radio show 'This American Life.' First-person stories and short fiction pieces that are touching, funny, and surprising."

http://feeds.thisamericanlife.org/talpodcast


WNYC's RADIOLAB

"On Radio Lab, science meets culture and information sounds like music. Each episode of Radio Lab is an investigation -- a patchwork of people, sounds, stories and experiences centered around One Big Idea."

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/index.xml


CNN STUDENT NEWS

"CNN Student News utilizes CNN's worldwide resources to bring each day's top news stories to middle and high school classrooms. The 10-minute, commercial-free program encourages student participation and provides classes withhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif context for understanding current events."

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/cnn-student-news-video/id179950332


TED TALKS

"16 great TEDTalks that could turn you into a lifelong TED fan in 18 minutes or less."

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/a-taste-of-tedtalks/id333575566

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Are School Librarians Expendable?

Take a look at the "Room for Debate" for June 27 from "The Opinion Pages" of The New York Times.

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(No) Ghosts in the Library

Another--this time library-centic--shenanigan from the folks at Improv Everywhere:

I Try to Keep Me Out of It, but I'm Both in the Center and Just a Link in a Chain

reflections on futurelab.org.uk’s article, “The Future’s bright, the future is…”

"When e-learning provides so many resources and in a way so easily personalised to meet their specific needs, what added value can schooling bring to the educational process? Answers to that question - and let’s hope there are hundreds - will help fashion a curriculum which will focus not on content but on equipping students with the skills they’ll need to select, evaluate and make most effective use of so much multimedia all-singing, all-dancing material."

I try not to write in the first person, and I think this is because as a teacher of English whose Advanced Placement curriculum is heavy on analysis, the old rule of thumb in conventional academic discourse is that first-person “I” is not used; rather, an objective, persuasive narrator maintains a person-less hold on the text that admits to no “I,” to no sense of infallible human error, but only is concerned with the ideas and analysis embedded in the text itself, as if those ideas simply and incredibly exist—no need for the feeble reassurance of a human author.

Obviously, I have already broken my own rule. But you knew that way up at the beginning of the previous paragraph.

But sometimes when we struggle to make sense of something (OK: “Sometimes when I struggle to make sense of something”), I need to say it simply like it is: “I think that….” This phrasing suggests more honestly where I am truly at in a given situation as a learner: I don’t yet know anything about this topic well enough to make a bold statement infused with certainty, but I am willing to venture into the realm of ideas, play around for a while, and try to figure some things out.

So…

The piece excerpted above—“The Future’s bright, the future is…”—is entirely spot-on when it comes to outlining one of the big challenges faced by students today—that students less and less need a curriculum based on content and more and more need one based on digital literacy skills. Absolutely. (I also think that I should be making my statements in a less first-person-esque fashion, but—as noted by such notable figures as Bob Dylan and the folks at futurelab—“the times, they are a changin’”). And I’ve thought this for years now, and I’ve thought this even more so every single week as of the past number of months. Is it something to do with starting a new decade that seems to encourage this thought that our technological world—our education world—is really changing as fast as we often predicted it would? Or is it really, actually starting to change as fast as we often predicted it would and we can no longer ignore the signs?

It is very difficult (impossible?) to know whether it is really true that “things are changing faster than ever before” today, as that sort of statement has also presumably been true at any other moment in our—at least recent—history. And yet: there is this underlying feeling, as a person today living in a technologically connected first-world country, as a teacher of ideas and writing, that my life—and particularly the life of my students—will operate in entirely different ways when it comes to information and meaning-making in the…quite near future. Does anyone else feel like a clock is ticking?

I didn’t want to use “I” to begin a discussion of this article’s quotation because, well, I wanted to make a well thought-out, analytical claim about the above quotation rather than “talking about it.” But the truth is I feel like any statement I make about the statement that “teaching students digital literacy skills is important and growing more so each day” is just another statement that I’ve already made. A number of times. Very recently.

So it feels like the only place there is to go is “I.” To me. To connect up thoughts, feelings—personal and professional—in a way that makes sense.

And the irony here is that—ostensibly—this is exactly where web 2.0 tools are taking us, each user: to a place where information, thoughts, ideas, feelings, and meaning are no longer consumed and analyzed in a discourse involving three people—teacher, student, and author—but in a way that involves every single person who might be connected to the student, who might stumble upon or be guided to the student’s reactions to the information, and in a way that is—because the student’s name (and often times picture, too) is stamped right on every single comment or reply she makes on her blog or class wiki or Blackboard learner management system. Learning—the interaction of ideas and meaning—is becoming both more personal and more social at the same time: more personal because the individual is now encouraged to put her spin on information and recreate it and rebroadcast it in a way that is intimately and distinctly hers, and more social because this broadcasted recreation—this mashup—will come back to her with comments and critiques from an audience that, well, exceeds her former educational audience of three by factors of ten, hundreds, thousands….

Strangely, the web 2.0 experience is “all about me” and “all about everybody else”: when I sit here at my computer and arrange the world on it in exactly the fashion that I want to, it feels very much like I’m at the center of an ordered information universe that I created; at the same time, I realize that the galaxy orbiting around me is the very thing that made it possible for me to create my own “information universe,” and that every other person like me out there in cyberspace is having the same experience. It is at this moment that I glance up at the “Hyperlink” button on my blog and am reminded that a much more accurate description of my reality online is as merely one link in a long, long, long chain. A "web" of chains.

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