Friday, June 24, 2011

Thinking About Distance Learning

Educators who surf the World Wide Web frequently encounter advertisements for online universities. The sales pitches are enticing for busy adults who seek a graduate degree; “learn on your own schedule,” “save costs,” finish quickly through accelerated schedules.” The advertisements come from diverse providers, including for-profit universities which have been in the news for unflattering reasons over the last year.
Verifying the accreditation of any university is as easy as visiting the web site of an accrediting agency to find the status of member institutions. Understanding the nature of and quality of online teacher education is much more difficult, however. For more than a decade, I have been involved with online learning as a teacher, a learner, and a facilitator of students’ online work. My experiences have been ancillary to my work as a teacher and an adjunct instructor of graduate courses in traditional settings, and these have led me to several conclusions and six bits of advice for educators who are considering an online degree.
Good students are good students. Students who engage with the course content, their classmates, and their instructors in a reflective and active manner will gain the most from the course. This observation is as accurate for online learners as it is for traditional learners. Openness to ideas and interaction matters most, the differences between those experienced online and those experienced face-to-face are of minimal importance.
Online learners miss informal interactions. When attending face-to-face classes, students have the chance to chat before, between, after, and during classes. Such conversations are a safe place for learners to question and validate new ideas and to test their thinking. Those informal situations are difficult to replicate in online settings so online learners have limited access to these valuable interactions.
Online learners gain access to more diverse colleagues. The population of learners for face-to-face studies is usually drawn from local populations; the instructors may have been drawn from more diverse populations. Online learning communities tend to be comprised of people from urban, suburban and rural, rich and poor, and racially mixed backgrounds. Access to such populations is a benefit of online learning.
Becoming educated requires knowledge, not information. Although an online program delivered on an accelerated calendar exposes students to the same amount of information as a face-to-face program meeting over a longer calendar, accelerated calendars do not allow for reflection on and application of that information which is an essential experience for teachers who are graduate students. One way to gain such experience is to participate in professional organizations while a graduate student. This also provides an opportunity for building a network of local colleagues which can be difficult for online learners.
Expect “canned” curriculum. In an effort to ensure all students are exposed to the same curriculum and to make the curriculum appealing to broad audiences, many online universities employ curriculum developers to build courses. While this does free instructors from class preparation (perhaps to devote more time to assessing students’ work) and it does allow for quality control by the managers of the school, it does limit teachers’ freedom to expand the curriculum, include emerging ideas, or respond to events that may influence how the content is perceived by the students.
Many online universities mix business and education, and the results are equivocal. As more institutions enter the online education market, there is a great deal of competition for online students; so decisions are may made with the goal of attracting and enrolling new students. Also, decisions may be made to maximize the tuition generated by a program and minimize the expense of providing the program; that goal is explicit in for-profit universities. I recently was offered an adjunct teaching position at a for-profit university. I quickly recognized that my pay would be well below the livable wage where I live, and my son calculated that he makes more per hour working part-time at the local supermarket than I would as an adjunct instructor for that university.
There does appear to be a role for online universities in 21st century education. Providing graduate level coursework and degrees for busy and isolated educators is one role. However, educators who enroll in such programs have a particular responsibility to be active learners and to find professional experiences beyond online coursework to complete their education. Further, students in these courses must realize that the degree-granting institution to which they pay tuition may be motivated by goals other than their students’ education. Although that may have been true of graduate education for teachers in the past also, it is more overt today. 

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Interesting Comments in Education in China

The more I try to avoid education issues as my summer starts, the more interesting and education-connected stories I hear.

This morning NPR featured a story about China, and a part of the story focused on the educational system.
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/22/137320938/chinas-businesses-boom-but-its-brands-dont

It appears there are two approaches to education: learn-this-and-don't-question-your-teachers or seek-creative-answers-(and-questions). The person being interviewed (an American PhD who was born and raised in China) suggested that the more creative approach is the one he values and seeks to instill in his students and it is one that is contrary to what he experienced in China.

I am in agreement... we cannot be sure what are students are going to encounter in their future and leaders (teachers, school administrators, politicians, etc.) who think they have the answers in their past are just plain wrong-- and the students who attend the schools designed by those people are in trouble (economically, politically, and culturally).

Monday, June 20, 2011

Privatizing education

I am increasingly concerned over the role that educators are allowing business and industry to play in education. Morning Edition on NPR featured a story this morning to addressed that issue:

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/20/137172536/fight-ensues-over-facebook-money-for-n-j-schools

For me the problem can be even more localized. In the last couple of years, I have been associated with a principal who has allowed a business-person-turned-philanthropist to gain deep access into his school. The philanthropist's advice as taken when making purchase decisions, curriculum decisions, and even decisions related to long-term planning. Now, I understand the reasoning... "the philanthropist has some money and we can gain some resources that would otherwise by unavailable." But one has to wonder if the costs of the philanthropist's cash is worth it: I observed several years' worth of planning and training made obsolete when the philanthropist decided that the school should use different software. I observed the school make an unplanned purchase of several tens of thousands of dollars so that the philanthropist's vision could come closer. I saw several educators become disenfranchised so that the professional development money spent for those teachers was effectively lost to the school.

Some of those disenfranchised educators and I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and we concluded that the approximately $25,000 from the philanthropist had cost the school about $50,000. Alternatively, we could conclude that the $50,000 spent by the school had resulted in $75,000 in purchase.

When we consider, however, that much of that money as spent on redundant technology (i.e. "upgrading" software that was perfectly functional) and that the philanthropist has ended the relationship with the school and there are several teacher-leaders who were displaced by the philanthropist and who do not anticipate returning to a leadership role in the school, the negative effect of the experience on the school culture and climate will be long-lasting; those effects will be around long after the technology purchased by the philanthropist becomes obsolete.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Magazines and Authentic Writing

Especially today, there are many options for having students' writing bound. I use Lulu, but I know there are many other options.

The Teacher Leader Network, which is brought to you by the EdWeek folks, has featured an article that gives some great pointers on having students write magazine articles. Great fodder for summer planning!

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

A Voice of Reason!

I have been frustrated with some of the news surrounding education at the end of the year... partly because of some stories and experiences with leaders who have demonstrated terrible "leadership" (I wonder how people with advanced degrees can hold some opinion they do and take the actions they do).

The I found a leader who shared his nine truths of data analysis...

I am refreshed by his ideas, especially his conclusion:

So, let’s end the talk of AYP and Race to the Top. Let’s talk instead about our moral purpose, which is, as Fullan reminds us, twofold: to increase the achievement of all students and to eliminate learning gaps.

Share this with parents!

ScienceNews carried a story about the health risks associated with watching television. Seems like a story we all should share with students and parents as they leave for the summer.

Also seems like a good argument for exploratory activities in middle schools (and other schools as well)... walking clubs, fitness-based PE, gardens, these are all activities that we should spend time doing with our students. Perhaps we can spark and interest that will keep them off the couch and well as adults.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Photo editing

A few students have been looking for options for editing photos-- they have a large collection of pictures that they have been taking on their digital cameras... typical end of the year stuff for middle schoolers.

I showed them Fotoflexer and Picnik... based on their reaction, I am thinking that those who look at this blog may also find 'em useful.

A frustrating story... but read through to the end.

When I heard the report on NPR yesterday about the issues surrounding a Rhode Island high school and the "failure" of the school to produce results despite radical changes in the organization of the school, I started reacting to the story and talking back to the radio. But by the end of the story, I was frustrated and largely resigned to accept that schools have largely become political institutions.

In the story as it appears on the NPS web site, we see  a large section of the story is dedicated to "placing blame." Teachers blaming administrators, administrators blaming teachers. In the end, students losing.

In the last several years, I have observed what I call "smoke-and-mirror" education becoming more common. Teachers are calling silly and irrelevant classroom practices "student-centered instruction." Principals are calling last-minute changes implemented to avoid labor disputes or reductions in staff "innovative reforms."

At the end of the story about Central Falls, we hear that the school has become "a cautionary tale about the complexities of school reforms and whether the federal government should be dictating what those reforms should be." Based on the evidence in the story and the observations I have made, I am beginning to wonder if educators should even be involved.

Just as the frustration sets in and I begin to loose hope, I had some messages in my inbox from NELMS friends, and I was reminded that there are good educators around and they are doing great work, and the NELMS community is full of these professionals.

Monday, June 13, 2011

I think I am in the wrong business...

FaceBook is worth $100 billion? Really?

Must be those FarmVille gardens grow magic beans!

Hackers and the Cloud

I am a fan of cloud computing... using web-based applications like Google Docs and similar tools. Recently, All Things Considered, the NPR news program, ran a story that focused on the treats to cloud computing from hackers. While the story does point to potential threats, it also points to a reason why cloud computing is appealing. There are threats to online resources out there, and as an educator who has all he can do to teach and support local users, I don't have the time or the expertise to keep ahead of the potential threats on the web. By using the cloud, I am joining a cooperative that is supporting those who do have that expertise, and I am trusting they will do their job well

NCLB News

In recent days, No Child Left Behind has been in the news as the administration has been saying that "rules will be relaxed" unless it is reauthorized. NPR has published a reasoned account: http://www.npr.org/2011/06/12/137135625/arne-duncans-plan-b-may-leave-no-child-behind 

I am thinking that we really need to think about reauthorizing a law that has left many children behind (the drop out rate has been increasing since NCLB arrived on the scene) and we have been measuring our value and placing our children's future in the hands of the test authors.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Open Source Textbooks?

Free online textbooks? Really? Are they credible? Can we use them to offer students experiences that would not be available otherwise?

These are questions I hope to explore over the summer, and this web site is one that I will put on my list"

http://www.ck12.org/flexbook/

Thursday, June 9, 2011

A spring stand-alone connecting art and science and computers...

This 10-minute TED talk it entitled "Taking imagination seriously," and the artist makes here point quite well.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

IMG00055-20110608-1400.jpg

Database question

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Digital Learning Amazes Me...

Yesterday, I was on our school's full-text database in search of a few articles for a writing project that has the potential of consuming my summer, when I found a new link to a product provided by the publishers: A collection of five foreign language courses delivered via video (a mix of audio with transcripts and video).

Sure, there are complaints that could be registered-- there is no instructor, there is no feedback, there is no way to justify a grade. But surely, there are benefits also. In my school we have no option for teaching French, German, or Mandarin, but students can at least be exposed to those languages and cultures via this new tool. The frustrating thing for me, is that I get excited about new technologies and new opportunities for our students available via technology, but when I share them with colleagues the reaction is usually something along the lines of "that'd nice, but it won't fit into my classroom."

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Apple's iCloud

The big news yesterday was Apple's announcement of iCloud-- a cloud computing platform. I am have been a cloud computer for some time, so I am unsure if it will cause me to change anything. Interestingly, in this BBC report, one of the experts who is interviewed does observe that cloud computing will be "the next big thing" with 70,000,000 Americans moving to the cloud in the next five years.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13677690

Google Earth... Weather Now!

A student (who is whining that I am not giving him a "shout out") was looking around on Google Earth today and recognized that there is now an option to add weather-- yes real-time conditions-- to a Google Earth display. The layers options now include radar and clouds as well as current conditions.

Perhaps this is a tropical storm forming in the Atlantic? (I doubt it.) This does put yet another amazing tool into the hands of students and teachers,  however.


Another Book for Summer Reading...

My pile of summer reading is getting too tall already, but this review of 'A New Culture of Learning' by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown makes me think I ned to put that one on my list as well.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Thursday, June 2, 2011

The World is Changing...

Hackers have been in the news lately... cyberattacks can be considered an act of war... China is attacking Google? Oh my...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13626548

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13614125

PhET Simulations

Many science teachers are aware of the collection of Java-based interactives maintained by the Physics Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I have used the collection with students in grades 5-12 for several years.

As I have visited recently, I have noticed several new and interesting simulations.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

YouTube Education

If your school IT folks still block YouTube, then perhaps you need to show them

http://www.youtube.com/education?b=400

Of course, they may be familiar with it already. Of course, they still may have god reasons to block it-- it can consume huge amounts of bandwidth!

Still, educators-- teachers, leaders, and IT folks-- can no longer ignore the content that is available on YouTube and the connection kids feel to it.

Cloud Computing

One of the web sites I hang around on (yes, I now I need to get a life) introduced me to JoliCloud... basically a "site" that allows you to manage your accounts on cloud computing from one place.

I am not sure how all of the applies to middle school educators, but I do think it points to the "de-webbing" of the Internet. Whereas much of the growth of the Internet in the first two decades of its existence was based on the use of the World Wide Web, much of the current growth occurs via "apps" which are accessed via the Internet, but are not the web as we have come to know it as an open resource that anyone can access.