The Digital Divide

The Digital Divide isn't just about students who have or don't have access, it is also about teachers. Across the country we are seeing and hearing about Bring Your Own Technology programs in schools which is great and good thinking. The problem happens in schools with their limitations in access, obtuse rules and filters, and most importantly overwhelmed teachers who have to juggle all these platforms and technologies and then somehow incorporate and integrate all these technologies and personalities in one class. And that is the rub, ONE TEACHER ONE CLASSROOM. That's the real digital divide.

Another common story is about a teacher in a school who is doing wonderful things, wins awards, is named a Teacher of the Year, and in the end wilts away, retires, or moves on. The problem of course it is always about one teacher in one school. The reason for this is that we have a terrible digit divide with teachers. PD in schools stinks and teacher training in colleges is worse. Walk into any school and we will find the majority not using technology and even worse too many not interested. The main problem is that we teach the way we were taught.

We need to rethink our schools before we implement any genius plan or copy any Teacher of the Year in our limited Model Schools. Schools are all wrong. Our students walk into school and have one teacher per class per hour. They spend too much time moving from room to room, setting up, and packing up. Each class is a different discipline like English, math, science, history and so on. One teacher and one discipline. Add technology to this mix and well you will get chaos, failure, and frustration. This has to change. Instead let's incorporate a real paradigm shift and actually think out of the box. Reconfigure that box. The students have a desk with technology that is their workplace, like an office worker. Redesign existing rooms with cubicles, knock down walls where possible to make larger spaces. In these new learning spaces, students work in groups and the teachers come to them. Teachers work in teams. These teams would be made up of a tech expert and a content expert. In cases where students are working on projects that demand different skills, a group of teachers move together. For example let's say the students are working on a project about the bicycle. The end product should be a webpage that incorporates wikis, blogs, flash and other technology. To help the students they will need a math teacher, a science teacher, a history teacher, a business teacher, a gym teacher and others to help them deconstruct the bicycle from different perspectives and then reconstruct the bicycle on a webpage for our global community. The students work in groups, provide presentations, and individual products. Schools design and create project ideas that involve their entire faculty. Of course the Internet becomes their resource and place to work. The students will go to lunch, go to gym, go to science labs, but they will work from their workspace and teachers will move among selected groups as a team. Redesign the school day to address education and the digital divide. This way the existing technology can be used better and the digital divide that exists with teachers will disappear. This will be part of better professional development in addition to more aggressive after school PD for all teachers. PD works only when what is learned is relevant, current, immediately used the next day. Teachers should stop working alone.

We shouldn't just be considering the student when it comes to the digit divide, we must also consider the teacher, and the school. Rethinking schools, reconfiguring schools is another way to fix and improve education in this country so that we DON'T continue to teach the way we were taught and keep getting the same discouraging results. Instead we must teach for the future by being the future. The paradigm shift I call for is huge and will require a great deal of work and readjusting as well as tearing down some walls, but that is thinking out of the box and really addressing the Digital Divide.

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Another F for Duncan

Feb 1 was Digital Learning Day. How many of us knew that? Exactly what was this day all about anyway? Out to lunch Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced, celebrated, and proclaimed Feb 1, 2012 Digital Learning Day. Does this mean that this administration has finally got it about technology? All they need do is do some homework and see what was happening when Riley was Secretary of Education. This is embarrassing and insulting to educators. But that has always been Duncan’s MO. This is just another shot in the dark kind of educational incentive clueless leaders proclaim, like his other forgetful programs such as Race to the Top.

Further reading of this block buster event finds schools in Modesto using technology to take attendance. They finally recognize that the web will expand the four walls of the classroom, but they have yet to think outside that box because they still have filters, which is up for discussion (nice concession), and they still have the traditional walled classrooms. So much for the celebratory Digital Learning Day epiphanies. The celebration is over moderated Facebook pages. Is this what we have come to celebrate as technology in the classroom. In the 90’s our scholars were constructing webpages using Flash. We have not used the lessons of the past to inform our present, forget about our future. This is what we get when we elect inexperienced people who appoint even less experienced people to an important position like Secretary of Education. The feds should get out of education because they don’t have a clue. This is not just in Washington, it is happening in NYC, too. That’s trickle down for you.

This is today’s vision from our current Department of Education in Washington DC.

Use the buzzwords and explain how the current trends in society are being transferred to the classroom and you will get someone’s attention. For instance: “Social media isn’t just a social activity anymore. Local schools and colleges are now not only instructing students on how to use it safely and responsibly, but using it as a teaching tool as well.” This article goes on to explain how a middle school has adapted a program called Bravebook that will simulate a social network that the students will explore and use without it being public for all. It is a training ground, a practice field so that the school can responsibly teach the students about ethics and correct use so that when they leave the school the hope is they will transfer these skills to the real world.

In another scenario, Twitter became an important tool for an infirmed professor to communicate with her class. I remember when we used programs like Blackboard to conduct class. Now we celebrate Twitter, Yikes!

Certainly one of the obstacles to correct and effective use of technology use in the classroom has been the filter, so bravo Chicago for lifting the ban on YouTube. YouTube clips have been vital for me in my instruction and I have had to use Zamzar to convert a YouTube video to a file I could then embed in my lessons. We all know multimedia presentations by the teacher and by the student are far superior to the mundane and droll word processed paper.

Hearing something we already know from a leaned colleague at an important conference helps make the point. So when an esteem journal pronounces, based on research, that that students want more from the technology in education, we should listen. “According to Project Tomorrow CEO Julie Evans, "Today's students have their own 'student vision' for how they want to use technology for learning. That vision," she said, "is really a statement of how students want to learn in general." From the points made in this speech we only need to look to YouTube to see the kinds of things students are doing from reviewing movies to commenting on events around the world. The students already use these tools, it is now our responsibility to provide them with educational opportunities in the classroom to broaden their expertise. We see the students using their web based hand held tools to access the web in class, in the street, at home and yet we have provided too little access in school and way too few classes that actually use the web to instruct and inform our young scholars.

And finally a gem about writing a 25 word story. Yikes has this become our limit? I appreciate the idea, but it is lame. That is why we have poetry, especially the haiku. A short story needs more than 25 words. This 25 word ditty would be great after the colon that follows the title of a short story or novella, but surely can’t be the final product.

The ideas about education and the use of technology has been compromised by the nano second conversation, the 125 word tweet, the flash of Facebook and the limited vision of a secretary of education. Our scholars need more, our teachers should be given control back to them, and our nation deserves a lot better than what we have seen from this current lame, leaderless Department of Education. Maybe it is time the feds think outside the box and fire the Secretary of Education because he just keeps on flunking.

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My New Exhilaraton

My blood pressure has stabilized to a comfortable and acceptable level in the past two weeks since I have retired.

My reading habits have changed. As an English teacher, my reading was primarily the redundant papers of my scholars and the readings they had to read to accomplish their tasks. It was not rewarding nor stimulating. When I did read what I wanted to, I would not have the stamina to read for a long time. Now, I'm finishing books sooner and reading more of all genre. I'm getting to those tomes I have let pile up and to those that catch my fancy. This is one of the first joys of retirement I was anticipating and waiting for.

I find I am more patient when I am working on a project. Before I had a time limit, now I don't. I had been wanting to build a simple little shelf in the bathroom to alleviate the bulging medicine cabinet. It was a simple little three shelf two foot by one foot project. One day I went to the lumber yard after dropping off some stuff at the Salvation Army and picked up the piece of lumber I needed for the project. I put it in my wood shop in the cellar. I waited for a day that wasn't a bike ride day to do the project. Three days later that day arrived and I dressed for the project. I put the radio on and slowly and steadily spent the next four hours hand cutting the wood, sanding and planing the wood, carefully constructing the shelf, filling the set nail holes with putty, more sanding and refining of the wood and checking to be sure it fit into the place for which it was being prepared. It fit perfectly and looked great. I painted it and then gave it the second coat and left it for installation the next day. I liked the end product and was very pleased with the process. That was new.

Another project spread over three days involved me cataloging books and creating a webpage of books I plan to sell. Again this project would have been done in a more rushed manner and would have caused anxiety and exhaustion. I took my time. I enjoyed the process as I perused the tomes and rearranged the books on their shelves. I was relaxed, did it without mistakes, no do overs, and was not exhausted. Instead I felt an exhilaration in the process and project.

That is it: Exhilaration. I am feeling exhilaration in my retirement. As I read a book and then return it to the library and pick up another book, I am experiencing a new exhilaration. The paths I choose to get from here to there are not the same nor are they the most expedient, they are leisurely and exploratory as if I were in another city discovering new venues and sights.

I snack on more healthy foods, I prepare more meals, and I eat slowly. When I feel I need a nap, I take one. And most importantly, when I need to go to the bathroom, I do. Now that's exhilaration.

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Everything is upside down

A friend forwarded me a post from the owner of a listserve for English teachers. The post was from February 1998 on the topic of computers in the classroom with this query for today's audience: Are teachers still scrounging for computers, or are computers plentiful and cheap? Do classes still use computers or are we on to other tools?

So much has changed these past 14 years. In 1998 we were on the middle of some very wonderful things using technology in our classrooms. Students were producing webpages, hypertext webpages that were the next and natural iteration of the codex that superseded scrolled text. The advancement of learning and shared information was huge when the scroll made way for the codex with its indexing and multiple pages filled with data and more accessible. We know what happened to the scrolls especially in the libraries of Alexandria and Pompeii. Today The Vatican, Oxford, The Library of Congress as well as many other locations house the tomes of the ancient modern world. Now Bartleby, Project Gutenberg, The Internet Public Library, Google Books, Librivox, and others have taken the time to digitize these classic codex tomes and remaining scrolls. When I taught, my scholars used these online sites to access the texts I could not have in my class or school library in addition to the burgeoning collection of online newspapers and magazines. We were reveling in the democracy of the Internet and in education as inspired by our giants like Jefferson, Dewey, and Freire. The webpage is a natural transition from the codex because it starts with an index page that has hypertext links to further pages that contain more text. The text my scholars made were their multi media webpages that were essays written in their English Class. I was lucky to continue this practice from 1993 until 2012.

Today, I am retired. I left with my scholars still making webpages. When we once had a plethora of places to construct free webpages, we now have few and with too many limitations. Fewer provide sites where the user can write their own HTML. Now they are basically wizards. That's not making webpages. Because of the limitations of the current webpage building process, I was forced to resort to the lesser medium, The Blog. For me the blog was a step back to the days of the scroll. The blog scrolls like ancient times or like toilet paper.

Another hindrance to the advancement of technology in education has been the filter. The leaders of today, like the leaders during the Inquisition, are convinced they know better and enforce their misguided mores on the rest of us. Ironically the very things that they filter are blocked from teachers but not from the students. Teachers have had very useful sites blocked for the wrong reasons while our scholars are accessing and updating their Facebook accounts which are not blocked successfully.

We have plenty of computers in our schools, but they are not being used very well. Sites like Wikipedia are feared and bad mouthed and yet encyclopedias and texts edited with bias from publishing houses that are more interested in profits than in truth are pushed on us. The mistakes of printed texts will always exist as long as those books exist in our schools and are past on from affluent schools to less affluent schools as the former upgrade. This is a situation when we should burn books. On the other hand, web based texts upgrade immediately, correct mistakes, and even in some cases archive these changes so future scholars can watch the evolution much like how the OED operates. Teachers are more comfortable using prepared sites from those publishers for a price rather than doing their own research online. We are getting lazier and have missed a great opportunity to create our own curriculum from the Internet.

What is happening is that our scholars are now using handheld devices because all they need is to produce 128 character tweets or Facebook entries. The sad irony is that Facebook is about to go public for billions of dollars and that represents the dumbing down of America. Just the other day I heard about the editing of Scott's novels, because they are too long. Today is Dickens' 200th birthday and I wonder what his or Twain's reaction would be to the state of writing in our social networking society. These are writers who used the serial to develop tomes. Now we are going backwards to a limit of 128 characters. That's characters, not words. Words left us awhile ago for letters and word parts. We have not used the technology well in our schools and we are suffering. The result is the proliferation of Facebook and tweets. This does not bode well for literacy or humanity.

And then on the other hand literacy and perhaps democracy are blossoming in China and Egypt. While reading an interesting article in New Yorker called "Working Title" Leslie T Chang, stories that were started on the Internet became best selling novels but without sex. They were Horatio Alger type books aimed at the growing middle class working society of China. In Egypt, what were once democracy creating tweets and Facebook entries, a former Google employee, Wael Ghonim, used a Facebook page to communicate has now written, Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power: A Memoir.

However this and the fate of technology in our schools reminded me of Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron." Facebook is our new Handicapper General. Once upon a time computers provided us the opportunity to be producers and to evolve from codex to hypertext. Instead we have regressed to the scroll and 128 character limitations. The opposite democratic effect is happening in American schools where we are now tracked, monitored, and bombarded with targeted ads. Social networking is not freedom, it is the opposite. It portends the fears of 20th Century SciFi that are now a reality.

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Retirement

Today was my first day of retirement. I slept late, got my son off to school, did some chores, took a 4 hour afternoon nap, watched some English football, and had a great dinner at Craft. All in all I highly recommend retirement.

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Rebranding Teachers

Finally a positive assessment of Teachers.

Read more and hear the show at this link to the segment on the Brian Lehrer Show.

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Celebrating John Lennon's Life

Singing "A Hard Day's Night"

With Tommy and Caitlin

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