Think Like a Teacher

TeachersFirst is blessed with a wonderful team of reviewers. The challenge we face is maintaining a consistent voice among so many teacher-writers. This same challenge rises in any collaborative student project where each student writes a portion of the content. How do we maintain a voice and writing style that does not scream, “Listen to how different I am”? Of course, in the “real world,” there are editors handle this challenge, shifting sentences and wrangling words to conduct a song in unison without erasing the beautiful tone of each writer.

As I work with our team, I realize that the lessons I learn from these lifelong learners, our teacher/reviewer/writers, are similar to those any teacher learns from students. My lesson this week was on feedback. The editorial team decided to share screencasts of the editorial process with each reviewer. The screencasts follow the mouse as the editor reads, mulls things over, makes changes, moves things, and –in effect–thinks “on screen.”  It is stream of consciousness editing in real time. (That element of time matters.)

You could do the same: have a student “editor” (or you) use a tool like Screencastomatic (reviewed here) to record the process of revising a piece of writing. Another possible tool is Primary Pad (reviewed here) which plays changes back like a tape recorder. Keep it simple. Focus in on changing one to three things that writer needs most. Let him/her watch as you combine sentences to eliminate redundancy or add active verbs. Don’t TELL him,  SHOW him.  Don’t talk about it, just share the link and see what happens. Perhaps have a slightly more talented writer make a recording for one who is having trouble with a specific aspect of writing. As a precaution, retain a copy of the original, in case the writer feels robbed of his work.

In the case of our reviewers, the response was as authentic as the situation. The process has taught me a lot about how we learn as writers. My fear going into this was that we would violate the very personal ownership that writers feel. Instead, we are hearing excited feedback on the screencasts. Specifically, if the release of ownership is motivated and justified by a purpose (such as making a group project sound consistent or making our site more consistent),  most writers will respond, analyzing what they observe about the changes at a level of metacognition any teacher would thrill to see:

As I looked at the screencast last night, I do see more what you mean in past feedback and what you are looking for…. I am making a list of the words, phrases to stay away from as well as use as examples to be a better writer. The screencast was actually much better feedback than just…comments. I really appreciated having that.

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I LOVE this, thank you for doing it! It is so helpful for me to get a better idea …. Based on what I see, more of my sentences should start with verbs - making them have more of an active voice and I’ll definitely try to combine sentences more effectively.

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The screencast is a lot more effective than the mark up on a word doc, I think!  It’s like, real time, or something.

This feedback on our feedback is enough to put screencasting high on my list as a powerful tool. Whether we respond to professional work, student lab reports, stories, or essays, we can offer an authentic, real-time window into revision and writing. And it takes a LOT less time than writing up all those comments … or reading this lengthy post!

This is a story of powerful teacher collaboration. It is the story of TeachersFirst. A comment by a colleague yesterday made me stop and think about what an amazing, living organism TeachersFirst really is, thanks to care and feeding of an amazing team of teachers. Teachersfirst may not be as sophisticated at the human body, but look what this team of teacher-leaders has wrought:

A database of  over 13,000 TEACHER-reviewed resources

Each review (example) begins with and passes under the eyes of at least three different teachers and includes title, creator, description, classroom use ideas from real, thinking teachers who know what it’s like in the jungle out there,  subjects, grades, tips to address the many safety/school policy concerns of web 2.0 tools, information on plug ins and media types, tags to connect to related resources. This is teacher-friendly information designed to help fellow teachers quickly find and use what other teachers recommend. This is collaboration.

Scores of teacher-tested units, lessons, and interactive “ready to go” activities, all TeachersFirst “exclusives”:

Each lesson, unit, or interactive piece, such as The Interactive Raven and Dates That Matter, is created by a classroom teacher (or two), often after that teacher tested, adapted, tweaked, improved, and  used the activity/lesson/unit for years in the classroom. These lessons work. If J.D. Power and Associates rated them, they’d rank #1 in reliability. Over half a million teachers and students used the Interactive Raven last month. The TeachersFirst organism thrives on sharing, just as humans thrive on social interaction.

Regenerating and growing, all the time:

Every week, these teachers collaborate to add 25-40 new reviewed resources. They select a dozen or more as “Featured Sites.” Our standards for what is a “feature” keeps rising as we collaborate in looking at all that the web has to offer,  filtering our excitement for that innovation through practical realities of the classroom and the needs of today’s students. Every week there is a new Brain Twister, Weekly Poll, Across the World Once a Week question,  TeachersFirst Update, editor’s blog post (here) by yours truly, and often a new Special Topics collection. Growing, growing. Every living organism continues growing.

Healing when we are sick or “break something”:

The Thinking Teachers know that wellness is important, including web site wellness. We have a trusted team of primary care and specialist geeks who listen as we describe symptoms and ailments. Even the nasty effects of predators attacking servers are held at bay. Fortunately, we heal quickly, usually within an hour. This organism is also fortunate to have guaranteed health care (funding) and nurturing from our generous, non-profit “parent,” The Source for Learning. (And we keep our healthcare costs under control!)

Surviving and thriving through adolescence:

TeachersFirst, age 13 and a half, recently passed through the challenges of adolescence as we matured to TeachersFirst 3.0 in summer, 2011. Like any middle schooler, we still allow vestiges of our childhood to show through occasionally, but we have  matured remarkably, thanks to the joint efforts of a team of Thinking Teachers from California to Florida, from Colorado to Australia. Teachersfirst 3.0 is a twenty-first century teen, strapping and strong. Like any young adult, we still need positive reinforcement and a few kind words to keep us going, so we relish the messages we receive through Twitter and “contact us” emails.

Our stem cells are teacher-leaders:

The DNA of TeachersFirst lies in its team of teacher leaders. Typing and cross-matching to infuse new content is careful and deliberate. It takes over 80 candidates to match a new member to our review team. But the shared DNA is that of Thinking Teachers, the ones you admire and listen to because they are willing to share and grow alongside their peers and their students.

Healthy and agile:

Like any healthy organism, TeachersFirst adapts. None of us knows what will be the next big thing in technology or the next mandate or pendulum swing in education. But the power of teacher collaboration that grew TeachersFirst is fit and prepared for whatever comes next — together:

Thinking Teachers  - Teaching Thinkers.

I recently combed through thousands of pages on TeachersFirst’s servers in preparation for the launch of TeachersFirst 3.0. I whirled as thirteen years of teaching with technology rewound in a few clicks. Yes, we have revised our site several times since 1998, but we have never cleaned out the attic of unused items. As points of perspective, 1998 was the year TeachersFirst launched. It was also the year of Titanic (the movie) and the introduction of Viagra. Today’s younger teachers were still in elementary school. If you were a teacher then, you likely had to walk to the school library or designated classrooms to even find a computer. Fortunate schools had one projection device that sat atop an overhead projector to “show” the computer on a screen. Do you remember?

As I clicked through TeachersFirst’s digital attic, I laughed aloud at a 1998 TeachersFirst tutorial on Netscape, complete with images and explanations of what a “Back” button does.  I unearthed a page that explained “plug ins” (not the kind that deliver air freshener). I blew digital dust off technology tips about “floppies” and  warnings from the days before school web filtering, recalling the humble roots of the iPad and IWB.  A very thorough 2001 TeachersFirst professional module explained a new concept in teaching: the webquest. Of course, there were no user-friendly, web-based tools to create or share a webquest online, so teachers placed the instructions and links in Word documents or learned to write html code and host it on their Tripod or AOL member web page. Only the adventurous teacher-geeks survived that trial by ftp.

Then there were TeachersFirst traffic statistic pages. Like a box of old snapshots,  these pages showed how many teachers accessed how many “page views” on TeachersFirst during September, 2003: a mere 143,000 per month in those days, and zero percent of them were from countries outside the U.S. What about today, you ask? Try millions of pages viewed per month from over 70 countries with users and members visiting TeachersFirst. Everyone is a web adventurer now. Indeed, the web itself ceased being an adventure many years ago.

Where were you thirteen years ago this month? Did you use the Internet? My classroom was the first in my school to hijack one of the extra office phone lines and connect to the Internet via a dial-up modem– I believe in 1995 or so. The cable ran all the way down the hall, strung behind the panels of the dropped ceiling during a weekend visit by my geeky friend, the computer teacher, with his handy roll of telephone wire. If the office picked up Line 4 during our online session, we were unceremoniously thrown off. I would leap to the computer before the kids could hear what the principal was saying to the person on the other end of the call.

So I should not have been surprised to find several generations of digital treasures in TeachersFirst’s attic. But we should all be impressed at how far teachers — and the world– have come in 13 years.  I gleefully tossed many, many old and unused pages to the “permanently delete” list as we decided what was worth revising and keeping. I can only hope that the next few years will see at least as much change in the power of teaching and learning thanks to the web.

In just a few weeks, we will be unveiling TeachersFirst 3.0. I hope you will find it as fresh and exciting as the Internet was back in 1998, but without the challenges!

I am no longer spending day to day life in a classroom with kids, but I continue to learn from my job. My connection with kids may be more vicarious than it was before, but I continue to learn as part of education world. So for the New year, I stop to share my top learning moments of 2010.

Things I learned this year:

It’s worth asking.
In the spring I received a letter inviting me to join a group of professionals involved with technology in education on a trip to China. If I had not formulated a plan delineating how TeachersFirst could benefit from my participation in this trip and then had the nerve to ask whether The Source for Learning would share in the cost, I would have assumed that such a trip was simply not possible. Many months and many thousand miles of travel to China later, I am very glad I took the risk to ask.

Laryngitis does not mean the absence of a voice.
In June, I gave my first full hour “lecture” format presentation at ISTE in Denver. Twenty-four hours beforehand, laryngitis completely erased my ability to speak. Over the next day, I communicated silently with pencil and paper, pantomime, nod, and smile. I discovered the kindness of many complete strangers and the willingness of others to do anything they could to help promote healing of my voice. You can read more about the experience in my post. The bottom line: my “voice” came through in far more ways than simply from that presentation. Not only did the sound re-emerge from my mouth amid the presentation; my passionate interest in creativity and facilitating it as essential to learning (and often with technology tools) echoes in upcoming articles and presentations — and my desire to refine the voice of creativity together with other articulate professionals.

Comparison can hinder vision.
The China trip showed me so much about how people on the other side of the Pacific view learning, how they “teach,” and how Chinese parents and society expect education to look. The easy way to talk about everything I saw in China is to explain it in comparison to what we know in the U.S. The skies are more polluted than ours. The level of laws concerning health and safety is far less than in our litigious society, etc. But I find myself stopping mid-paragraph as I continue this comparison. What is important is not the side by side comparison of “them” and “us.” In fact, the very comparison to us blinds me to nuance and sounds, thoughts, philosophies too different for comparison. There is no one-to-one, force-fit, side-by-side way to understand China. If we focus on competition and comparison, we will never hear the intellectual phonemes the Chinese articulate that simply are not part of our thinking language. We will learn far more from dialog.

Watching learning is learning, too.
I am lucky enough to have two grandsons, one born in 2010. Watching them learn reminds me of what classroom teachers do every day. We watch learning, and in the process we learn, too. That experience never stops. At the end of every day, each of us– even those in no way involved in education– should ask, “What did you see someone learn today?”  If everyone pondered this, society might find a whole new approach to what education is and should be.

Zero technology days are a good idea.
Although I had perhaps 3 of these during 2010, the days when I do not touch my iPhone, listen to MP3s or Pandora, check in on Facebook, watch the news, connect to the Internet, or answer email are precious indeed.  Not only do I focus entirely on people and places. I also return to the  grid with new perspective and energy. Lithium ion is not the only kind of recharge.

To all who care to stop by and read here, Happy New Year. What did you see someone learn this year?

Posted once I was off the plane and back online after some sleep…

As I write this, I am flying past Mt. Fuji on our way back to the U.S. The plane is packed with people, including more Americans than I have seen in the past two weeks. It seems strange to encounter strangers who speak to me in English! The long flight (10+ hours with a tail wind) gives me a chance to reflect a bit on the trip. I have many more posts to come with corrections to some of my early observations and a lot more to tell about each place we went.

Ten + 1 things I will miss about China

1.    Surprising juxtapositions of smells, foods, colors, people, and buildings

2.    Ni hao, xie xie, and “smiling”

3.    Traveling and learning amid forty amazing educators who see education as a dynamic, personal journey for both student and teacher

4.    Profound, broad Chinese pride without hubris, a pride in their historic ingenuity, current progress, and rising status in the world

5.    History unfathomable for those of us from a country a mere 235 years old and the Chinese people’s love for that history as their common anchor during times of trial

6.    Our national guide, Shawn (his English name), and his willingness to respond insightfully and respectfully to every question; his head bobbing slightly to the side as he began each response with a smile. His English was impeccable and quite sensitive to subtlety.

7.    Symbolism, spirits, dragons, earth, and heaven, feng shue (sp?) surrounding us until we actually began to notice the details on our own

8.    Streets, sidewalks, and highways swept spotless by lone workers with large, curled, natural straw brooms

9.    Learning to resist the urge to compare everything to the U.S. and to simply observe and learn

10.  Laundry opportunism: city apartment buildings tall or low, decorated with laundry drying in hazy sunshine, row after row of gadgets suspending sheets or shirts stories off the ground. Laughing to see more clothing left hanging from street lights by residents who climb to snag available drying space

11.  Crowds of petite, pony-tailed women in fitted wool or bright puffy jackets, short skirts, and fur-topped boots and men in black puffy coats and skinny black pants, waiting to dodge deftly across traffic

Things I will not miss: 

1.    Chicken knuckles

2.    Chinese traffic/drivers, especially motorbikes

3.    Crossing multiple lanes of Chinese traffic as a pedestrian

4.    Air pollution!!!

5.    “Pretty lady, you buy —!” yelled in my ear and grabbing my arm

6.    Nonwestern toilets/bathrooms bereft of toilet paper, hot water, soap, or paper towels

7.    Coins worth .10 yuan (about 1.5 cents)

8.    Small coffee cups with no refills

9.    Creepy Santa decorations with haunting, Chucky-esque faces and Christmas music played with odd rhythm or instrumentation, making Christmas into a cheap imitation holiday

10. Paper napkins big enough for no more than a cocktail and serving dishes placed beyond human reach in the center of the giant, glass lazy susan — and without a serving utensil. But at least I finally mastered chopsticks!

Ten things I will DO with what I have learned:

1.    Launch XW1W- a worldwide chance for students to exchange a taste of their daily life, coming soon from TeachersFirst

2.    Never again assume that I know what the Chinese want for themselves or for their schools

3.    Continue working to help make creativity a core classroom value and offer practicable ways to talk about it, value it, help students build it, and help parents (and those less accustomed to living it) find ways to appreciate and foster it in their own and their children’s lives

4.    Continue to ask questions and feel about for answers on the complexities of Chinese culture

5.    Try to keep a finger on the pulse of what is happening in Chinese education

6.    Never ignore a lost or confused international visitor in a U.S. airport or tourist attraction

7.    Stay in touch with this group of educators and continue to learn from their prism-like way of separating new light into different ideas

8.    Try to make TeachersFirst approachable and helpful for Chinese educators and those in other non-Western countries

9.    Get back together with our delegation at the ISTE conference 2011

10. Continue posting on this blog as I assimilate all that I have collected from the trip

A tweet and blog post by another teacher this busy morning brought me up short. As teachers, we make job changes less often than many, and this time of year brings many reflective moments among those who are making changes. So focused on learning, no teacher can make a change asking, “What have I learned from this place I am leaving?”

Four years ago this week, I made a major change. After 27 years as a teacher, I moved into year-round mode running TeachersFirst (previously my favorite moonlighting job) and out of the immediate cocoon culture of K12Land. It is only right that I stop after 4 years to reflect on what I have learned here in Nonprofitland.And, like the teacher above, I wonder a little about whether I have sold out.

Top five things I have learned after 4 years “on the outside” (sort of):

5. Moving on should not make you feel guilty. Once you get past the guilt for being able to go to the bathroom when you please and no longer helping 150 kids each and every day, you start to notice the reach you do have from your new place. Once you stop labeling your changed constituencies: “at risk population,” “sell out,” etc., you realize that every population needs you. The immediate impact on kids is far less obvious in Nonprofitland, yes, but after a couple of years, you start to see new root systems for growth developing because of the things you have planted. In today’s world, Twitter and rss feeds help us see that extending growth.

4. Teachers trust those who still hear them. Not every teacher has the opportunity or motivation to move out of the classroom to Nonprofitland (or Profitland– yuck!).  Teachers will continue to trust those on the other side of the fence as long as we still listen and feel what classroom life is like. I don’t think I can ever forget being in the classroom. At least I hope not. (My husband says I will talk like an 8th grader for life.)

3.  Kids are the best alternative energy in the world. Outside the classroom, you have to find other sources to generate the electric moments, and they are MUCH harder to find. I find myself talking to the kids at the neighborhood pool or reading and commenting on class blogs, etc. just to connect to that power source. When my energy runs low, it is one of the few places I can recharge.

2. Teachers conduct the energy their students generate. Since I no longer have contact with the kids every day, I rely on contact with their teachers. OK2Ask, in particular, acts as conductive material passing along the electricity. But I can talk to any teacher in person, in email, on Twitter, or through blogs and feel the buzz again. Like my iPhone, I need regular charging.

1. It is much lonelier outside of school. No amount of electronic contact will ever make up for the camaraderie of bitter, stale coffee and peanut M&Ms after school in the faculty room. Don’t say, “Misery loves company,” because that’s not it. Know that you — as a teacher — are living in a place no non-teacher will ever understand. The roots you cultivate daily are hopelessly tangled with many others. Even if you move to a different school/garden, those roots are as persistent as crabgrass, and they love entwining with others. Outside of school is a manicured, landscaped, well-mulched world that is not weed-friendly. When you first find yourself the only crabgrass in a bed of azaleas, you will need to find new ways to feel that you belong. There is nobility in crabgrass.

As a teacher, I am always intrigued by what people notice first. Reading Kevin Jarrett’s and Kim Cofino’s posts (one recent, one not-so) brought up a flood of ideas about the way I do the things I do and how other people sometimes look at me funny when they see things on my computer.

Teachers are professional observers of the way kids do the things they do, but we forget to notice the same about adults. First grade teachers pride themselves on analyzing the way a kid holds that fat pencil and helping him adjust it so the letters look better and the paper doesn’t tear. Swim coaches watch the way one arm enters the water and know that is why the swimmer rolls too far. Learning support teachers know that Doug or Lisa only “sees” words set off by white space or remembers words he/she says aloud but not the ones he/she hears. Geometry teachers look at how a student starts a proof and know where he/she is headed and what he/she sees first in that maze of triangles and line segments. We constantly analyze brain paths.

Why don’t we do the same when we help adults? The UI* “experts” (hired consultants to tell you your web site is badly designed) can tell you where people go first, click first, and get lost. They are the visual merchandisers in the mall of web pages. (Did you know that Americans almost always walk to the left when they enter a store?) Teachers are experts, too, but we forget to watch when we are trying to show another adult how we managed to make that web tool to do that or how to build a template in Google Docs. We need to remember that the way we do the things we do may not be the other guy does it, and he needs to recognize his own way.

A year ago I reverted to an Mac computer after a ten year hiatus.  Two months ago, my colleague made the same switch.  She read manuals. I did not. She learns from print. I do just fine with print, but given the choice, I go for colors and images. I color code emails, folders, fonts…everything. (I would probably color code people in a room if I could figure out how. Unfortunately, I remember new people first by the colors they were wearing — a real liability since they tend to change clothes!) Color and position have greater impact than text on the way I do the things I do. My colleague wants to write thorough, sequenced explanations of any how-to. She, like most teachers, uses words as her primary means of communication. I certainly talk enough, but I figure things out visually. Then I translate them into words orally, and finally into writing. So when it is time to teach OK2Ask sessions to other teachers, my plan is visual at the start. I want to SHOW things with colorful cues. But I know there are adults who don’t notice color. They are looking for magic words like “start” or “go.” That’s the way they do the things they do. Kim’s second graders in her post had no fixed way to do the things they do because they were young and flexible. She helped them notice their ways. We need to help adults notice, especially if they are accustomed to what seems like random clicking  followed by failure.

What do you notice first in the produce section of the grocery store? Colorful fruit? Signs with prices? The words “Bonus Buy”?  When you open your email, what do you notice first? Names? Dates/Times (numbers)? Red alerts or boldface? Are you an icon person or a label person? Are you a menu person or a drag-it person? If your computer (or Google Docs) folders were color coded, would you remember better where you put things? When you explain where to click do you say “click Save” or “click on the blue button in the top right to save”? How do you do the things you do? How does the way you do the things you do affect the way you help the adults you help?  

[This post is captioned for GLL (Geek Language Learners) *UI= Geek speak for “user interface” or how-people-click-and-do-things.]

This is the final episode in a long fable, and perhaps the start of another. Unravel the previous chapters here.

The town of Forwardthink has completely changed. At the stroke of midnight  (about 1 pm Pacific Time) on May 12, the doors of the Town Hall opened, and an arm tacked one final message on the door. From inside, the sounds of music and dancing and jingling keys of gold echoed across the near-empty square. Outside, the few remaining Innovators rushed to read the message.

It was a vaguely familiar sheet of paper with a scrap pasted at the end– pasted onto the same message that had been posted for others in mid-March. The scrap bore a few new words explaining that the winners were already inside the Town Hall, apparently ushered in by a secret passageway several days before.  As the handful of remaining, bedraggled and tired Innovators huddled to read and re-read, a small voice from among them sighed,

“The Elders did not even take the time to cross out the old version of the “go away” message and start a fresh piece of paper to tell us they did not want us. They have simply pasted a scrap of a sentence at the end of an old message. I guess we were not worthy enough to see the Elders or hear their actual words.”

“But look! We can see the Winners through the windows!” cried another as he jumped up and down to see over the high sill and beyond the newly opened blinds.

They took turns for a minute or two, boosting one another by the foot so each could see the party of Winning Innovators. But their energy for jumping drained quickly. The MySciLife Innovators drew away from the window and stepped to the sidewalk together.

“I was SURE you would be among the winners,” came a voice from a passerby. Others who passed hummed in agreement.

Epilogue

Although the Elders of Forwardthink have not invited the MySciLife Innovators  to join the Winners inside the Town Hall, these Innovators did not simply pack their knapsacks. As the small gathering around the Town Hall dispersed, careful ears caught the MySciLifers words, “I heard there may be a different kind of Elders in other villages who may be willing to help. Let’s look at our maps, then set out for the unknown territories. If we stick together, we will find our own key of gold somewhere.”

Moral:

In a tug of war between the wisdom of the crowd and competition, who wins?

[In the spirit of crowdly wisdom, insert your moral here]

Ning  shook the world of web 2.0 junkies late last week by letting everyone know that they are going to change their terms of service and no longer offer “free” social networking spaces. Many, many teachers will ask, “who cares?”  Those who have been teaching and learNing using these spaces have filled the twittersphere and a vocal Elluminate get-together to vent, discuss alternatives, and stir a web-based uprising for web 2.0 consumer rights. The conversations in Elluminate the other night included several digressions into web 2.0 business models  as seen through educators’ (idealistic?) eyes. Adam Frey of wikispaces articulately shared their philosophy for K-12 schools and was careful to underscore the fact that every tool has its own unique model. We educators would like to think that the nobility of our cause is enough to justify “free”– forever.  After all, we gave up the big bucks to serve kids, so why can’t these web 2.0 companies? Free is the noblest route. But in today’s web 2.0 world, will it last?

As a person who runs a FREE (ad- free) web site, I am often questioned about where the money comes from.  Teachers — and even my curious friends — are secretly skeptical that we at TeachersFirst must be:

a. planning to “bait and switch” to a fee-based service as so many others have done
b. quietly advocating for a frighteningly evil cause
c. vulnerable as minnows about to be eaten by the Big Fish of the web
d. secretly funded by independently wealthy philanthropist individuals (ha!)

Actually, you should have blackened the space for e. none of the above. Unlike today’s amazing web 2.0 tools, we are a simpler site.  You can’t remix, mash up, or random-generate anything except ideas and resources for learning. What you can do is FIND anything. Good stuff. Written or reviewed by Thinking Teachers. Free. No strings. No “while in beta.” No ads creeping in next to what you really want to see. No bikini-clad models selling you anything. So skeptical (thinking!) teachers ask me directly,  “What is YOUR business model?”

The answer is simple: Robin Hood.

Our non-profit parent company is fortunate enough to have something that cellphone companies want to buy–or lease: frequencies. Those same companies that make money from your teenage students’ text messages and from charging people for precious minutes are also giving us their money. Rob from the rich (cell companies),  give to the poor (teachers). What truer justice could there be?

I wonder, though, why this “business model” could not be translated into other web venues. Wikispaces has adapted the semi-Robin Hood scenario….Take (at a reasonable fee) from those who CAN pay, and give to over 300,000 “poor”  classroom teachers. Strike a blow for Robin.

Today’s web 2.0 world has far more tools than can ever possibly survive. There are so many slideshow makers and PowerPoint wannabes that our review team simply drew an arbitrary line and stopped reviewing them. Perhaps we should examine the Robin Hood legend long enough to point out that Robin Hood is himself a physically fit, thriving benefactor/thief. Those not strong enough for a few sword fights will not survive, even if they are able to snag a few bags of gold. But I sure hope the good ones will wield their web 2.0 swords a bit on their way to hand over the coins of learning to the kids  and teachers who are ready and waiting.

There is a stir  in Forwardthink.  MySciLife, our finalist entry in the Digital Media and Learning Competition, is complete, including this video.  One of these days I’ll upgrade our version of WordPress so we can simply embed it here. But for now…go take a look.

The town of Forwardthink is abuzz during these final days before the deadline for videos and proposed budgets.  Who will “win”? Who knows!?  But the process of imagining, thinking through, and visually explaining a whole new way of learning using digital media has Innovators twisting every digital knob, mashing together different types of files,  converting, combining, and clickety-clacking mice or smooth, glassy touchpads in their excitement. And we are the”old people” who are trying to give the real students a chance to learn this way. What a wonderful, nesting Matryoshka doll/box of learning: we learn how to show our ideas so real students can say it even better outside our carefully crafted box. Their box of learning is actually the larger one that envelopes our vision and grows yet another and another layer.  We “innovators” have carved a small but beautiful vision, the smallest inner seedling of a doll/box. The best thing that can happen is for students to encase it in their own, more artful ideas.

Back in Forwardthink, we Innovators are busy marveling at how pretty our starter Matryoshka doll/boxes are. We hover about the Town Hall doors. The Elders have not even told us when to expcet The Announcement. The Wise Crowds are still busy sharing their insights. And we wait to learn:

In a tug of war between the wisdom of the crowd and competition, who wins?

 I think it’s the  Matryoshka dolls of learning who ultimately win. We are just part of the process.