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This blog post is a response to an article that was published Education Forum, the magazine of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation. I ask all readers to assist me in crafting this response so I can submit it to the publication as a response. Please comment on my take on the article, and suggest ways of improving. I’ve also opened up my Google Doc so you are able to access and edit the document directly. A collaborative, measured response is what I feel is called for in this instance.
The Luddites were Right in Education Forum: A Response
For a teacher to claim that we are losing "the battle of trying to get students more prepared to understand why things work and how" and that new fancy technologies are to blame, is not only short sighted, it’s missing a very large point. In the article in Education Forum of Fall 2009, Adam Mercer rants on about the evils and dangers of embracing technology in our schools. His negative toned diatribe is filled with loaded statements. "I have a cellphone because my wife wanted the thing." Calling it ‘the thing’ leads me to the impression that he feels his life would be better off without it, let alone all the other technologies he mentions in the article. He is entitled to his personal opinion about technology, but when it comes to deciding what works best for students, we can’t make the mistake of assuming that what works best for us, will work best for them.
His claim that high school students should be capable of basic academic research on any topic, using a variety of sources and techniques is absolutely correct. His premise that Wikipedia and Google are powerful tools and good starting points is also spot on. What he fails to note is that there are many more search possibilities than those on the internet, and that the most recent, up to date information is more likely to be found online than in the resources in the average school library. Our school districts and the Ministry of Education pay for access to huge databases of current and relevant information for students to access. Why don’t students access these? That’s the role of the teacher to point students at these resources and teach them how to search for better information. Books in a library may provide a good resource, but very often the information is outdated and of little value to the student. He makes the claim that "we teach them to find bias in books and newspaper articles, but they rarely apply that thought process to electronic source material they us." My question is why not? Why are we not teaching them that the same skills apply. In my mind, it’s our job to help students learn how to evaluate all sources of information, be it the newspaper, or the website for the ‘hazardous chemical’ dihydrogen monoxide. Critical thinking is critical thinking. Teach them to apply it to all cases.
When he claims that technology has degraded our ability to spell, and derides a student leader using quotes around ‘leader’ for not knowing how to spell one word, he shows a confirmation bias in his analysis. One student does not a research study make. If your spelling is degrading, then perhaps putting away your computer will bring the skill back up to snuff. My guess is that there is more at work here than a simply word processor.
As for mathematical ability and student using calculators, he states that ’students do not often understand why their calculations work." Again, that’s a teachable moment. Taking away the calculators and enforcing rote memorization might lead to quieter classrooms, but true in-depth understanding will only come if you inspire students to that deep understanding. A calculator is a tool to allow easier and faster computation. If your testing of students solely relies on how well they can calculate, then in my opinion, you haven’t taught them the deep mathematical principles anyway. If we use the tools as tools, and use them to leverage a deeper understanding of the process and make the grunt work a little faster, to me, that’s a good thing.
Which brings me to iPods and cellphones. He states that these are "technologies that we do not want being used in the classroom." My question is, "Who doesn’t want them?" I sure would love to have class set of iPods or Blackberries. The problem of off task behaviour by students texting each other during a class is one of teaching, classroom management, and engagement, not one of technology. Back in the 80’s when I was in high school I didn’t hear teacher complain that they wanted to ban pens because students spent time writing notes to their friends rather than the note off the blackboard. Perhaps because now the communication method is different that it’s more obvious when students aren’t interested in the lesson before them. It’s easy to pretend that since they are writing with a pen they must be engaged in what we’re doing in class. I’m afraid that’s just not true.
When it comes to relationships, the nature of who we call our friends is changing. To make the claim that using technologies mean that students "are losing their ability to interact in a meaningful and caring way." is very shortsighted. Students today don’t see the difference between an online life and an offline life. They are merged together in such a way as to have them be just one life. If a student is able to find a person with common interests and can share dialogue and interactions with them, it shouldn’t matter if they sit next to them in History class, or if they are halfway around the world. We can’t put our perceptions of what constitutes a relationship on to the students.
The final point I’d like to address is that he claims that schools are in danger of disappearing because "the public is under the impression that most of our job involves getting large amounts of information into the hands, and ultimately the minds, or our students. Sooner or later people will question the wisdom of having the system at all if that is all there is to it." In this I say, bring it on. If teachers consider that their main function is to impart all the worlds knowledge to the students and at the same time ban hand held devices that are a portal to all of the worlds knowledge, then we are doing it wrong. You are right that most have the internet at home. Mobile devices allow us to find any fact at the touch of a screen. That’s a wonderful opportunity! We can teach all the skills that he claims technology doesn’t allow us to use. We can teach about evaluating information, using information for purposes of problem solving, communication with a worldwide audience, forming connections with networks to establish a caring empathetic global community of learners. If all the system is there for is to pour a body of knowledge into an empty vessel of a student then maybe it is time to re-evaluate the system. I envision a system where students are allowed to find any knowledge that they need and to use that knowledge in creative and new ways and to find solutions to the problems that have been generated by decades and centuries of old world thinking.
To claim that technology is responsible for the decline of education is like blaming the automobile for the decline of the horseshoe industry. Times change, things evolve and its a good thing. The one thing we have as an advantage over students is a bit of hindsight and wisdom. Teaching them in the way that we were taught will not prepare them for their future. It barely prepared us for our present. The Luddites didn’t destroy weaving looms because thought that they had a better way of life without it, the destroyed it because they were resistant to the change. As I recall from a presenter at a conference recently said, "If you think you don’t like change, wait and see how you feel about irrelevance."
This is the third video in a series from Symphony of Science. They are all really cool, but this new one is my fav I think.
I spent this weekend at a conference in Oshawa at UOIT called What Really Works: Strategies to Improve Teaching and Learning. It was organized by the publisher McGraw Hill Ryerson, and was primarily aimed at faculty from colleges and universities, as well as students of education. Since I have an interest in technology and e-learning, and I’m in the M.Ed. program at UOIT, I decided that it would be a worthwhile way to spend the weekend. There was an interesting lineup including keynotes by Richard Katz and Alec Couros.
The opening keynote was Richard Katz from Educause. It was interesting presentation. He spent a fair amount of time comparing the demise of things like newspapers and publishing to the current state of universities. He drew some parallels and said that in a lot of ways universities were ripe for the same sort of downfall that has happened to newspapers. He also talked about how this is a golden time for scholarship and with all the connections and tools and access there is more scholarly work happening now than ever before. He stated that there is a degradation in the traditional sense of communities on campuses happening even though people are more connected that ever. He didn’t give any hypothesis as to why.
Then the tone of the talk changed, at least to my ears. He spent a lot of time asking open ended questions, that seemed to point to the current state of affairs lacking in credibility. He mentioned Wikipedia, Twitter, the Open movement and seemed to point to the lack of organization as a bad thing. Now granted, he did say that he was going to push our thinking on some things, so maybe he was asking questions to promote deeper thinking on our end of some of these things, but to me, it seemed as though he was leading the crowd to their comfort zone. He spent time saying how much change was happening, but that the old model was still valid, and that scholars are right in how they do things. I was left wanted further explanation of his point, as I was confused as to where he stood. But maybe that was how he wanted it.
Seneca College – Tablets in class
Attended a presentation by instructors from Seneca who are using HP tablet laptops in their math and science classes along with some interactive software so that the students are participating in class and sharing in real-time the things that they put on the screen. Very neat project. Their first set of data shows a small increase in grades, but a large increase in attendance from the students. They were more likely to attend class to use the technology. Not surprising perhaps, but nice to have people doing research on engagement with tech.
U of T – Tech in Large Science Classes
Next presentation was by a chemistry prof at U of T on how they use technology in first year chemistry classes. There are 1100 students in the program, and individual classes can be up to 500 students. (!) They use some tech tools like tablets for interacting with their notes and computer during lectures. They now using Flash models of molecules for 3D visualization of chemical processes. This was an interesting presentation, as the presenter seemed to go out of his way to say why they didn’t do certain things. For example, he didn’t post his own notes very often as he felt students needed to be engaged in class and create their own notes to be successful. He also said that students in every class wanted to know if he’d podcast his lectures for later review, but in his words “I don’t think they have the time to listen, and even if they did, what would they get out of having me drone on for an hour?” I’m not sure the irony of what he said was apparent to him. In my opinion, students having access to multiple modalities is a good thing, even if it wasn’t his favoured style of learning. His final slide had things like: Don’t provide everything students want. Don’t let tech take over. Try new things. Very odd message with some inconsistencies in there.
Academic Integrity
This was an interesting presentation of a slice of PhD research that was done on nursing students and their views on cheating and academic integrity. She found that students often cheat as a coping mechanism with the stress of university. She also showed how students were ‘cheating’ when the shared workload and co-wrote online quizzes that were for small portions of their marks. They also co-wrote and peer-edited papers for larger projects. This was seen as ‘cheating’ by the researcher as well.
One person in the audience made the comment that workload sharing and co-authoring papers what what we all did everyday, and that if the professor was worried about cheating with this kind of assignment, then perhaps they needed better assignments ,and teaching. I almost gave a ‘hell ya!’ but I didn’t. Glad someone said it though. They seemed more interested in fighting with students to maintain the old style education, rather that critically evaluate their own system to have it better meet the students needs. A good discussion of the issues followed the presentation. Lots to consider in that.
Social Media in the Classroom
This was a journalism prof at Durham College who wanted to engage student journalists in social media. She couldn’t find what she wanted, so she created GlobalStudentJournalists.net to have as a classroom teaching tool. It’s open to any student of journalism in the world, where they can post what they’ve written and produced, and get feedback and comments from other students and educators. A very neat project. The only thing I questioned her on was that she had to moderate and approve every single post and comment before it went live. She claims that this is to make sure that her class is a good teaching environment. I understood her point, but the whole idea of being a censor of her student journalists didn’t really occur to her I suspect. Still, a great teaching tool for journalism.
Laptops v.s. Hand taking of Notes
This was a neat study where they compared the effectiveness of students taking notes by hand or with the assistance of a laptop. Turns out that no matter what they use, students don’t take very good notes. 
A few things came up that merits further study. The laptop notes tended to be linear, text only, where the hand notes had lines drawn with concept connections being made. Their main conclusion was that you shouldn’t enforce one style of note taking on students, as they are all different. I don’t know if the UofT Chem prof was in the room or not, but he should have been.
They didn’t explore things like audio recordings, or pictures taken with mobile devices, or co-writing of notes. This was a baseline study that has really opened up a wide area of further considerations. Pretty interesting things though.
Closing Keynote – Alec Couros
I was anticipating this keynote, as I was curious as to what Alec would say with an academic, higher education type audience. I pretty much know what his message is to K12 teachers and teach candidates. I’ve spent time reading his blog posts, interacting with one of his online classes and have seen a few of his presentations online. I had finally met and chatted with him a week earlier at the ECOO conference in Toronto.
He did a great job of taking the crowd on a tour of tools and online activities that he uses both in his professional and personal life. He had a positive message about online activities and what the perceived v.s. actual issues tend to be. He pointed out a few tools that I had not seen or used, so I now have a few things to investigate as well.
His message to this, admittedly mostly newbie, crowd was: don’t be afraid of it, and take a risk. He then showed how much can be gained from doing some of things that he does. Good teaching should be transparent and shared. A good message to take home.
The applause at the end of the session was very loud, and very long. It spoke to the appreciation that the crowd had for the session. I think that some of them were glad that one of their own had the courage to say what others were thinking. As well, I think that the whirlwind tour of the possible was enough to spark thinking in those that maybe had not immersed themselves in the possibilities. All in all, a great keynote!
Personal Reflections
I think that the divide between K12 and Higher Ed is still a fairly large one. There were numerous comments and remarks that made me think that some of these educators were more interested in maintaining their status quo, and blaming the students for the lack of engagement than they were in evaluating their own system and teaching. Not all though. There were some great innovations out there, and lots of good research and thinking happening. It was good to see.
There was a lot of take aways for me as I’m currently enrolled in my M.Ed at UOIT and looking forward at what type of research I might consider doing. More than anything, I think this conference underscored the fact that there is a LOT of research that needs to be done to evaluate effectiveness and impact of technology in education.
I think that we all need to learn something everyday. Actually, more to the point, I think we all do learn something everyday, we just need to pay more attention and realize that we did. At any rate, today I learned a few things from @dougpete. Go figure. I learned that Windows Live Writer for blogging is actually a good tool. I’ve seen it before in the Live Tool list, and it was actually installed on my Windows desktop machine with 7 when I updated a few weeks ago. Never bother to look at it. I guess I assumed it was only for Windows Live blogs. But nope, it connects to a whole slew of them including WordPress. So I’m using and trying! So far I like it. That’s what I learned today. A good product, and not to be so quick to judge with pre-conceptions.
Along that train of thought, here’s what I learned two days ago via this video. Sort of the same idea, only in the icy water of Antarctica. Be careful what you assume. You very often are wrong.
Tweet Totals: 2 days of STAO and 1 day of ECOO
So what?
I can hear some of you now. What’s a tweet? What does it matter?
I think it matters a great deal, and it speaks to some of the issues that I think we are having in education in general, and in science education in particular. In one of the sessions today at the STAO conference, a presenter was discussing how we are facing a crisis in recruiting new students into science and technology in post-secondary education and on into industry and research. We are not alone in this. This is a trend that is all across North America. The question is why? I think that the answer has multiple levels to it, as its a complicated one, but the one that occurs to me today is the disconnect in the way we teach science, and the way that students interact with science in their lives.
Look around you. You see the impacts of science and technology everywhere. You’re reading this on a device that is the result of over 100 years of progress in physics and chemistry, from the electricity generation stations, to the circuits in the device to the materials that house everything inside. Its all a result of science. So what do we want more than anything as classroom science teachers. A new set of text books. We tell students that they are not allowed to use any of the technological devices that they bring with them to class so that we can use a book to learn about the science that led to these technological devices. What? Why do we do that?
We close the door to our room, and then discuss the impact of global warming on the planet. We use the internet to pull up a picture of a polar bear on an ice floe. But we balk at the idea of having kids use the internet to speak face to face with someone who sees polar bears regularly, and lives in the arctic. Why are we so scared of the technology? There was a session I attended at STAO and it was done via videoconference. A group of three teachers were visibly surprised that it was done that way. The chatted and talked audibly for about 10 minutes (and the presenter could hear the noise) and then got up and left. Why didn’t they see that kind of interaction as valuable? It was great. The presenter was in Minnesota and did a great job of the presentation and then a short Q&A at the end. Just like a regular presentation. Only without the expense and carbon footprint of flying to Toronto to do a 1 hour gig. Cool.
Which brings me to Twitter. At the same dates and times in two parts of the same city, two conferences were occurring. One science teachers association and one educational computing organization. You’d think we’d have lots in common right? You’d think that the science teachers would love to be with those that love to use technology to teach? Right? Apparently not.
In my non-scientific analysis of the available data. Over 2 days of the science teachers conference there was a total of 25 tweets sent out with the #stao hashtag. 14 of them were by me. 260 tweets were sent out of #ECOO in just one day!
Oh.
I was very happy to jump into the Twitter stream and read what people were saying as I sat in my sessions in a conference across town. In a lot of ways it was like being in two places at once. I was learning about science education here, and clicking links and getting quotes from speakers across town about using technology to assist in improving education. It occurred to me that we all needed to be together! We’re doing the same things!
So what? What does it mean? Well, I think it means that science teachers are not yet plugged in to the concept of professional learning networks. I think that we as a whole system are not used to the idea of sharing thoughts and having professional conversations with others using technology. I think we need to be. I’m realizing that I missed an opportunity to advance this with a presentation at STAO. Maybe next year. My hope is that we wouldn’t need to have it presented to us. My hope is that we do better at online collaboration and sharing and being open.
Don’t get me wrong. Science teachers are awesome. I think that I’ve realized that the type of connected teacher that attended ECOO and went to the TwECOO meetup is not the average teacher that is in our classrooms across the province. But we’re starting, and we’re growing, and we’re breaking down the barriers and the classroom walls.
We just need to continue. And maybe speed it up a bit. The students aren’t slowing their pace of learning, why should we?
I think it was driven home by @msjweir when we were chatting via Twitter this evening.
Can’t we all join in and continue our conversations? Isn’t that how we learn?
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