There have been so many challenging messages that I have been chewing on over the past months. The latest is David Perkins’ new book, Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education, has really hammered some things home for me. I am not even half way through it and I am seriously convicted. He discusses how learning is most effective and relevant when students have the opportunity to apply learning within the context of “the game” – situating learning in relevant, meaningful and authentic contexts.

Tonight in class my students were to learn about WebQuests. With a limited amount of time, I struggled with how best to approach this. A number of very good ideas came to mind, all of which would have taken a great deal more time than was available. Then I stumbled upon WebQuests about WebQuests by Bernie Dodge. After a very short overview, I decided to have my students, in groups of 4, complete a webquest of their choice listed on this page. It was almost magical to watch them engage… engage in ways not possible when I am “waxing poetic” at the front of the classroom. They managed various roles/perspectives, evaluated 5 webquests on a number of domains, compared notes and perspectives, discussed what made some webquests “better” than others, negotiated a winner and loser, and justified their positions with each other. They were deeply engaged in a high level of discourse and evaluation that I hadn’t seen before.

Then it occurred to me that they were, as David Perkins describes it, playing the game. In his book, he outlines seven principles of learning by wholes. They are:
1. Play the whole game
2. Make the game worth playing
3. Work on the hard parts
4. Play out of town.
5. Uncover the hidden game
6. Learn from the team… and other teams
7. Learn the game of learning

But there are different kinds of games. Perkins writes,

“Schools and other settings of learning ask us to do many things that aren’t all that enthralling. We feel as though we are playing the school game and not the real game.” – the whole game.

This reminded me of a sign I used to have on my office door:

I have so much more I’d like to share about Perkins’ book… and will. But we… I need to let students play the game – the whole game whenever possible. Focusing on the small components is fine and essential at times, just like getting in the batting cage. But the real excitement and passion is cultivated when the teams take to the field, the crowds are in the stands, and the pitch is thrown toward home plate. It gives practice meaning. Purpose. Relevance. Authenticity.

I don’t know about you, but I have to get my students playing the game more often… And I will.

So, in the sprit of that thought, I am returning to some ideas that I have been wrestling with as a result of reading Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985). If you have not read it, I highly recommend it. Like anything else Postman writes, it is not an “easy” read. But you need to be doing this type of reading. Reading blogs has been wonderfully rewarding and challenging, but at times it can be a little synonymous with “quick mental snacks”. In these exciting times of immediacy of information and access to so much great public discourse, don’t rob yourself of the opportunity (and discipline) of getting lost in important ideas found in great books. Be certain to feed yourself in diverse ways that both feed and strengthen your noodle.

Here are two related quotations that I have yet to reconcile:

“…television clearly does impair the student’s freedom to read, and it does so with innocent hands, so to speak. Television does not ban books, it simply displaces them.” (p. 141)

We know that “screen time” has increased over the years with kids and adults alike (Pew1 Pew2). There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Yet, one can’t help to raise the question, “What’s being lost?”. And, to follow up on that question, “Is what’s being lost worth losing?”

Neither of these questions are easy to answer. The first question requires one to determine if indeed something is being lost, and secondly, if the answer is “yes”, then is the loss significant? Does it matter? Is increased screen time simply altering tools of reading (like the Kindle), or is it displacing valuable reading habits altogether? Although I have no statistics to support my hunch here, I tend to think that the Kindle and other such devices are not “the rage” with kids. Although great writing can be accessed and read online (not yet where it needs to be, though), I know that is not how most kids are spending their “on-line” screen time.

Here’s my next springboard in this thought stream:

“As a television show, and a good one, Sesame Street does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.” (p. 144)

So, to extend Postman’s idea, is the Internet encouraging children to love learning or simply love the Internet?

No doubt, kids are learning on-line. However, it seems to me that the challenge to teachers is greater than ever. Kids are huge users of the Internet, but to generalize, they are not such great learners who are able to harness the incredible power of Internet resources and capabilities to connect to unparalleled learning networks and learning opportunities. They need teachers to show them this side. They need teachers to set them up to be part of powerful, meaningful, and relevant learning that takes advantage of the incredible resources just a few mouse clicks and browser plugins away. They need teachers to help them form (not give) worthy questions to pursue. They need teachers to help them organize their “plans of attack”. They need teachers to show them how to efficiently and effectively find relevant and valid information. They need teachers to make them think about the hard questions they are not thinking about or are avoiding. They need teachers to help them see that hard work is a worthy endeavor. They need teachers who understand multiple ways of collaborating, sharing and creating learning artifacts without compromising the quality of the learning outcomes. They need teachers who understand the great learning potential that can be harnessed with new tools and new ways to work and create and share. They need other leaders and administrators who understand all of this as well.

So where does this all leave us?  Where does it leave you? These ideas continually challenge me. They challenge my students and sometimes come from my students, which I love.

Photo credit: Cayusa

Addendum

This is NOT how we want kids to be using their network potential!

The beauty of technology is that it allows us to do more than we are capable of doing on our own and it frees us up to focus on what we do best while letting the technology do what it does best. In this case, it allows us to fairly easily record our presentation slides, with or without video of ourselves as presenters, but certainly with our voice narration (and with a interactivew whiteboard, record pen notation as well), and make those presentations available on the Internet to be viewed by our “audience” at their own leisure. Sure, you can’t then poll your audience or check for understanding… or even enter into a discussion. But, I would argue that most presentations don’t really allow for these types of interactions and wait for the presentation to conclude before any serious discussion – if any at all.

In a recent post by Jon Becker, he notes that many professional presentation could be recorded a few weeks ahead of a meeting or conference and listened to at one’s own leisure prior to attending session(s). This would free up much needed time to discuss meaty content rather than just absorb it and move on.

Below is a video on how one school is approaching “content delivery” and homework. Homework has changed from worksheets and difficult to complete assignments to listening/watching teacher presentations of content (homework) to be discussed and worked with in class. This frees up class time for more active learning – exploring, testing, discussing, experimentation, trouble-shooting,… the very critical learning events that often get shortchanged due to time constraints. With a new generation of media junkies and students who thrive on new forms of media, it seems to be a no-brainer. Content can new be watched on computer screens, portable media devices like ipods, or even cell phones, making it that much more accessible. Of course, not all types of learning are appropriate for this medium, but certainly those that are primarily delivering content are. Viewers, then, also have the added benefit of being able to listen to/watch the presentation or key parts multiple times to grasp complex concepts or big ideas. This way, getting left behind or becoming distracted/losing focus never needs to be a problem.

I think we could all think about how to better use our face-to-face time (which best maximizes the expertise of teachers) while taking advantage of the many synchronous and asynchronous teaching/learning opportunities out there. WE are not the best part of the content. WE are not “all that”.

So, read and laugh! You will need to click on in it to view the entire cartoon.

1. Incredible resources and conversations shared and taken place on Twitter
2. Educon2.1 sessions webcast via Mogulus
3. Fantastic discussions in class with my students
4. Some excellent student blog posts
5. Volunteering in my son’s first grade classroom
6. Some excellent Elluminate sessions
7. Seeing how kids’ needs are not being met in school
8. Struggling to find a balance between “keeping up” with information and “digesting” information
9. Laundry
10. Technical problems
11. Struggling to find a balance between “keeping up” with information and “digesting” information

Here are seven things about me that you may not know:

1. I grew up on a small hobby farm in the eastern part of the Canadian province of Québec. Milking cows and goats was NOT my daily highlight!
2. My elementary school of 200 in Mansonville now has a 1:1 laptop program, part of a larger initiative in the Eastern Townships.
3. During college, I bicycled 2/3 of the way across Canada, from Vancouver to eastern Ontario, with best friend. We cycled around Cape Breton Island the following summer. I still want to cycle through Europe, especially through the areas of the Tour de France.
4. I was an elementary music teacher in Toronto and took a ferry to work which was at a small school on Center Island in the Toronto harbor.
5. I swam in the waters off Hong Kong, not knowing that the area was prime shark habitat.
6. I was bitten by an octopus while in the southern Caribbean.
7. I taught at Ball State University’s K-12 lab school Burris (Muncie, IN), working daily with a huge number of preservice teachers, which gave me incentive to go back to school there and get my Ph.D.

I’m tagging:
@briansmith
@elenorsturtle
@matthewtabor
@dwaltman
@Jazzymiles

To participate, each person tagged should list seven things about themselves that would help their Personal Learning Network get to know them a little better. You can link back to this post by leaving a comment here, which links forward to their your update. Add yourself to the growing list of people who have revealed 7 things.

Over the holidays I finally found a moment’s peace to sit down and read it – a read that had been recommended by many folks who have an interest in issues surrounding effective use of tools for teaching and learning. I must say that I was sorely disappointed in Tufte’s presentation of ideas. The 31 page bound article was just about 30 pages too long. Here’s the synopsis:

PowerPoint by design leads to fragmentation and oversimplification of ideas. It should not be used as the sole means to communicate [important] ideas and it is often used to mask shallow knowledge and poor presentation ability. In fact, PowerPoint may indeed benefit the bottom 10% of all presenters as it forces them to have points and follow them.

There you have it. You don’t have to go and read it now.

Well, to be fair, Tufte provides a number of critical examples where slideware negatively impacted the communication of critical ideas. But, there is so much repetition and redundancy in his narrative that it made me want to skim and even put it aside.

My biggest disagreement with the ideas presented is that Tufte seems to imply quite clearly that PowerPoint holds a great deal of the responsibility for [mis]communicating ideas represented on the slides. Tufte criticizes PowerPoint’s inherent design in that it forces big and complex ideas to become oversimplified, abbreviated, watered down, paraphrased, and fragmented because the rich detail required to fully comprehend cannot be contained on sequential slides. He argues that the slideware presentation tool harms content. He argues that a better presentation tool should be word processed documents. To quote Tufte,

“To make smarter presentations, try smarter tools. Technical reports are smarter than PowerPoint. Sentences are smarter than the grunts of bullet points. PP templates for statistical graphics and data tables are hopeless…For making serious presentations, replace PP with word-processing or page-layout software.”

Where I disagree is in the idea that PowerPoint is smart at all. PowerPoint is not a method. PowerPoint holds no power to “harm content”. It is not meant to provide copious amounts of detail. It is not best used as a stand-alone presentation. It requires an audience who can critically listen. It requires a well-informed presenter who can effectively present and engage. I do agree that PowerPoint makes it deceptively easy to be a bad presenter. However, that is not PowerPoint’s fault. When did we stop thinking and allow tools to dictate what is effective? In agreement with Tufte, we have done that. But this just amplifies the larger problem of learning “from” tools rather than learning, as David Jonassen writes, “in partnership with” them. Sure, PowerPoint should not replace true research and effective written and oral communication. But to suggest that all presenters should make serious presentations with word processed documents fails to get the root of the problem here, namely, the presenter. Certainly, providing an audience with technical reports or research papers that hold the critical details of concepts being presented has great value. And, the act of writing a paper first and not just creating a presentation is often an essential step in learning the content first in order to present it effectively to others. Too often teachers have assigned a PowerPoint project that facilitates cut and paste thinking and shallow understanding. The result is often a terrible presentation AND little learning to show from all of that time spent on designing the presentation. But, the act of researching and writing a paper does not guarantee a good presentation of those ideas.

The really honest statement that Tufte makes in all of this is the following:

“The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.”

PowerPoint is not evil. It holds no authority over content. Yes – understand its limitations. However, blaming the tool does nothing to get to the root of the issues, which IMHO are poor research skills and shallow research, no critical thinking, insufficient preparation (which often should include a written analysis of some kind), and poor presentation skills.