Can Educators Learn?
Phil Bartle
"But I have a question. And this is addressed not just to you, but to
everyone. Why is it that educators -- the people whose job it is to teach
students about new technology and concepts -- do not want to learn the
technology themselves?
I am not taking a position on use, or ease of use, of technology, I am just
curious why this attitude exists. Thoughts?
Cheers,
John"
The old saying went:
Them that can, do
Them that can't, teach
and them that can't teach, teach teachers
I have been an educator al my life.
In the widest sense of the word.
When I turned forty, my magical ability to learn languages disappeared
I have been steadily dropping in my learning abilities since I was three
In the eighties my fellow social scientists thought I was some sort of
a nerd (not a nice term then) because I was the only one of them with
an apple two clone and modem and able to use the university computer
from my home for grading, composing and so on.
Now I find it hard to keep up with all these educators using wikis and
other web .0 technology
So I am now in my mid sixties, retired and disabled.
Age might have something to do with it.
Perhaps I should put this together into another rant. . . . .
:-)
Cheers,
Phil
If the coach does the pushups,
The athlete will not get stronger
Community Empowerment:
www.scn.org/cmp/
WikiEducator
http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Philbartle
Join our discusssion forum
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Community_Strengthening
Wong Leo
--
Leo Wong
--------------------------------------
http://helpsuzhou.blogbus.com/ HELP
There is something very special and powerful about engaging directly with the real teacher and real Kids
jkelly952
survey on "Why teachers chose resources (i.e., OERs)
The top two responses (by far)
* The content matches the grade level of my students"
* The content is up to date"
Should be considered in why educators do not use technology. Are we
meeting their needs with our creations or just our own?
Jim kelly
http://wikieducator.org/User:Jkelly952
kirby urner
Speaking for myself, I think Wikieducator provides a fantastic shared
infrastructure, however not every teacher needs to master Web 2.0
skills to be effective.
It's OK to serve a niche, a minority, and to remain friendly to those
expressing an interest, providing a guidance and advice in some cases.
This is what we encourage in the Python community as well: a lifelong
willingness to assist people overcome difficulties, especially ones
you remember overcoming, and how.
As a newcomer to the WE community, introduced through a webinar
announced on mathfuture (a Google Group), I am impressed with its
clean implementation and clear commitment to providing free, high
quality curriculum materials.
I look at Wikieducator as in part a showcase for teachers interested
in what other teachers have to offer, with the idea that we're all
here to learn from one another.
Here are people with enough skills and sense of ownership over some
content to bring their contribution to a world readership with
practically no strings attached.
That's an interesting demographic in and of itself.
Of course I meet other effective and committed teachers through other
venues as well, we all do. One has many ways to express commitment.
Television provides its own set of challenges and many operating in
that industry have little to no time for contributing directly to
wikis. This is not a problem that needs fixing necessarily, just a
fact to be acknowledged.
Kirby
4D
User: KirbyUrner
Edward Cherlin
>
> John raised the question:
> "But I have a question. And this is addressed not just to you, but to
> everyone. Why is it that educators -- the people whose job it is to teach
> students about new technology and concepts -- do not want to learn the
> technology themselves?
make them money, improve outcomes, or give them enjoyment. Until
computers can be integrated into the curriculum, they do none of these
four things for most teachers. Solving this problem needs to address
several intertwined problems. Two of them stand out to me.
* the perverse incentives in education, such as teaching to the test
* the impossibility of integrating computers into the curriculum until
every student has one 24/7 for use in class and for homework
The second will be straightforward to address in the long run,
although quite difficult to explain to those who don't see the bigger
picture. We need digital replacements for textbooks, and we need a
known base of free software that every child will have so that we can
integrate that software into the learning materials and the
curriculum. Sugar and Free Software in general give us this base on
OLPC XOs and on other computers using Sugar on a Stick. A number of
organizations are interested in creating, testing, and refining the
new materials. Funding would help, as we discussed a few days ago.
The first can be tackled when computers start to be integrated into
education, and we find that we can teach most topics more deeply and
at earlier ages. Then we will have some space in which to explore
without testing pressure, until the tests start to catch up with
classroom practice. By then, we should have further advances that will
give us a different set of spaces to work in.
I do not have a solution to the political problems that currently
bedevil curriculum development, except to wait them out, and do as
much as we can on everything else. Some of those political forces,
such as Republican support for Creationism and against meaningful sex
education, are predicted to die out in 15-20 years due to demographic
shifts. I can give you the statistical basis for this prediction and a
number of instances where we see the effects now, in issues other than
classroom education.
The ultimate solution to the problem is this: Teachers who dreaded
having to learn and use OLPC XOs have become their strongest
advocates. The verdict is clear from multitudes of teachers in the
field: "I can teach now." Once this is experienced widely enough, the
education schools will teach the computers to students who grew up
with computers, and no new teacher from then on will have the current
problem.
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://www.earthtreasury.org/
Patricia Schlicht
You might also want to have a look at the Teacher Collaboration Portal
on WikiEducator with a large crowd of global educators subscribed to it.
It comes upon invitation, so let me know and I'll add you with pleasure.
Feel free to add to it
See here: http://www.wikieducator.org/Teacher_Collaboration
Warm ishes,
Patricia
kirby urner
Kirby
On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 9:19 AM, Patricia Schlicht <PSch...@col.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Kirby,
>
> You might also want to have a look at the Teacher Collaboration Portal
> on WikiEducator with a large crowd of global educators subscribed to it.
> It comes upon invitation, so let me know and I'll add you with pleasure.
> Feel free to add to it
>
> See here: http://www.wikieducator.org/Teacher_Collaboration
>
> Warm ishes,
> Patricia
>
--
>>> from mars import math
http://www.wikieducator.org/Martian_Math
kirby urner
>
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 02:14, Phil Bartle <cmpb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> John raised the question:
>> "But I have a question. And this is addressed not just to you, but to
>> everyone. Why is it that educators -- the people whose job it is to teach
>> students about new technology and concepts -- do not want to learn the
>> technology themselves?
>
> People are interested in learning things that will save them work,
> make them money, improve outcomes, or give them enjoyment. Until
> computers can be integrated into the curriculum, they do none of these
> four things for most teachers. Solving this problem needs to address
> several intertwined problems. Two of them stand out to me.
>
> * the perverse incentives in education, such as teaching to the test
>
> * the impossibility of integrating computers into the curriculum until
> every student has one 24/7 for use in class and for homework
>
nuisance and annoyance.
For one, they're disruptive in the sense that students with a live
Internet connection are "worse than daydreamers" in wanting to browse
on the web during class.
Various classroom control systems make keyboards go dead, turn these
dumb terminals into little more than television sets.
On the other hand, students tend to like seeing the lecture up front
on a private window, sometimes with headphones supplying a
translation. And when the keyboard *does* unlock, there's time to
reinforce the concepts (plus the computer back in the dorm is still
unfettered, unhampered by nanny-ware -- unless that's willingly
installed by the student).
> The second will be straightforward to address in the long run,
> although quite difficult to explain to those who don't see the bigger
> picture. We need digital replacements for textbooks, and we need a
> known base of free software that every child will have so that we can
> integrate that software into the learning materials and the
> curriculum. Sugar and Free Software in general give us this base on
> OLPC XOs and on other computers using Sugar on a Stick. A number of
> organizations are interested in creating, testing, and refining the
> new materials. Funding would help, as we discussed a few days ago.
>
> The first can be tackled when computers start to be integrated into
> education, and we find that we can teach most topics more deeply and
> at earlier ages. Then we will have some space in which to explore
> without testing pressure, until the tests start to catch up with
> classroom practice. By then, we should have further advances that will
> give us a different set of spaces to work in.
>
Writing an algorithm to produce pi to a million places is not
practical *except* using a computer language atop a sufficiently
powerful library.
Adding to one's on-line portfolio requires learning some HTML/CSS,
getting some skills. In some schools already, these are skills
demanded by one's peer group, one's clique.
Like in Python culture, there's a lot of pressure to know Mercurial.
That's not coming from Guido or any teacher "up front".
I'm behind on this learning curve, mainly because I have no access to
safe secure classrooms where I could just sit back and enjoy a lecture
on hg, bzr, cvs, svn. I've been relegated to Duke's Landing on SE
Belmont, where we staged a diversity event recently.** PSU has me
idled (maybe not Reed though -- I have a footprint there, more than
one).
A lot of education is being responsive to peer group requirements
(which may include gangs, not saying there's always pressure towards
academic performance, on the contrary some cultures preach a distrust
of scholars, are more like Sparta than Athens, which sounds distopian
to me but I'm just reporting the facts on the ground as I see them).
> I do not have a solution to the political problems that currently
> bedevil curriculum development, except to wait them out, and do as
> much as we can on everything else. Some of those political forces,
> such as Republican support for Creationism and against meaningful sex
> education, are predicted to die out in 15-20 years due to demographic
> shifts. I can give you the statistical basis for this prediction and a
> number of instances where we see the effects now, in issues other than
> classroom education.
>
> The ultimate solution to the problem is this: Teachers who dreaded
> having to learn and use OLPC XOs have become their strongest
> advocates. The verdict is clear from multitudes of teachers in the
> field: "I can teach now." Once this is experienced widely enough, the
> education schools will teach the computers to students who grew up
> with computers, and no new teacher from then on will have the current
> problem.
>
USA gets bogged down in fighting the Scopes Trial, turns itself into a
Monkey Island, we still have other regions chomping at the bit to make
meaningful contribution to the advancement of our collective human
saga. They're not really stuck in line in some sequential pipeline.
We're *not* all waiting for the USA to get its act together, praise
Bob.
Iceland has been doing a good job, as has Ireland... South Africa.
I'm proud of many nations.
Some of our newest curriculum modules, for example these four new ones
on Wikieducator coming through my corner (including Martian Math)
maybe won't develop a following in Portland, Oregon, my home town,
despite my being on hand to teach it, share it with other teachers.
Perhaps my true fan base is in Vilnius or Gothenberg?
Given the Internet, that's not necessarily a problem, although I'd
prefer to have more team members locally (working on recruiting,
including through Pauling House). Thanks to Wikieducator, I'm already
finding a new community of collaborators. Web 2.0 is like that.
OLPC/XO is going to introduce a lot more children into this privileged
way of networking and I'm quite happy about that (during the Duke's
event, we upgraded one of my two XOs, to a more recent version of the
system (767)).
Kirby
** Diversity @ Duke's:
http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2009/11/think-tank-techniques.html
Edward Cherlin
>
> On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 12:20 AM, Edward Cherlin <eche...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The first can be tackled when computers start to be integrated into
>> education, and we find that we can teach most topics more deeply and
>> at earlier ages. Then we will have some space in which to explore
>> without testing pressure, until the tests start to catch up with
>> classroom practice. By then, we should have further advances that will
>> give us a different set of spaces to work in.
>>
>
> It's easy to change the testing such that computers are required.
> Writing an algorithm to produce pi to a million places is not
> practical *except* using a computer language atop a sufficiently
> powerful library.
Technically easy, politically hard, as long as the South and the rest
of the Bible Belt wants everything dumbed down. I hear that many
teachers who give calculator homework in math don't want to allow
calculators in tests. I, naturally, want Open Book testing extended to
Open Computer, Open Internet.
>> I do not have a solution to the political problems that currently
>> bedevil curriculum development, except to wait them out, and do as
>> much as we can on everything else. Some of those political forces,
>> such as Republican support for Creationism and against meaningful sex
>> education, are predicted to die out in 15-20 years due to demographic
>> shifts. I can give you the statistical basis for this prediction and a
>> number of instances where we see the effects now, in issues other than
>> classroom education.
>>
>> The ultimate solution to the problem is this: Teachers who dreaded
>> having to learn and use OLPC XOs have become their strongest
>> advocates. The verdict is clear from multitudes of teachers in the
>> field: "I can teach now." Once this is experienced widely enough, the
>> education schools will teach the computers to students who grew up
>> with computers, and no new teacher from then on will have the current
>> problem.
>>
>
> I'm glad we live in a parallel processing system such that if Lower48
> USA gets bogged down in fighting the Scopes Trial, turns itself into a
> Monkey Island,
To expand what I wrote earlier: We have encouraging polling data
showing that the Old South racism and intolerance are shrinking by
about 2% annually, almost all from the old dying off and more of the
young each year having actual multicultural, multiethnic experience to
convince them that invidious distinctions are evil. That means that
the tipping point on a number of political, social, and educational
issues will come in about 10-15 years, even in darkest Alabama and
Mississippi. I can give anyone interested the references. We also have
wonderful anecdotes, such as a Klan rally of about 10 at Ole Miss
(University of Mississippi, Oxford MS) confronted by about 250
students, many wearing Turn Your Back on Racism T-shirts and standing
with their backs to the Klansmen.
> we still have other regions chomping at the bit to make
> meaningful contribution to the advancement of our collective human
> saga. They're not really stuck in line in some sequential pipeline.
> We're *not* all waiting for the USA to get its act together, praise
> Bob.
Amen.
> Iceland has been doing a good job, as has Ireland... South Africa.
> I'm proud of many nations.
Check out Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal.
> Some of our newest curriculum modules, for example these four new ones
> on Wikieducator coming through my corner (including Martian Math)
> maybe won't develop a following in Portland, Oregon, my home town,
> despite my being on hand to teach it, share it with other teachers.
>
> Perhaps my true fan base is in Vilnius or Gothenberg?
Certainly Andrius Kulikauskus is there, running Minciu Sodas and
working on a math book for Earth Treasury.
> Given the Internet, that's not necessarily a problem, although I'd
> prefer to have more team members locally (working on recruiting,
> including through Pauling House). Thanks to Wikieducator, I'm already
> finding a new community of collaborators.
We also have the FLOSS Manuals, Squeakland, MIT and other Ed schools,
OLE, Creative Commons ccLearn, various museums, and others involved.
Also the state of California digital textbook program and the Open
Access movement, and more. See Stacy Reed's
http://www.librarianchick.com/ for available materials.
> Web 2.0 is like that.
> OLPC/XO is going to introduce a lot more children into this privileged
> way of networking and I'm quite happy about that (during the Duke's
> event, we upgraded one of my two XOs, to a more recent version of the
> system (767)).
Exactly.
> Kirby
kirby urner
< trim >
>> I'm glad we live in a parallel processing system such that if Lower48
>> USA gets bogged down in fighting the Scopes Trial, turns itself into a
>> Monkey Island,
>
> To expand what I wrote earlier: We have encouraging polling data
> showing that the Old South racism and intolerance are shrinking by
> about 2% annually, almost all from the old dying off and more of the
> young each year having actual multicultural, multiethnic experience to
> convince them that invidious distinctions are evil. That means that
> the tipping point on a number of political, social, and educational
> issues will come in about 10-15 years, even in darkest Alabama and
> Mississippi. I can give anyone interested the references. We also have
> wonderful anecdotes, such as a Klan rally of about 10 at Ole Miss
> (University of Mississippi, Oxford MS) confronted by about 250
> students, many wearing Turn Your Back on Racism T-shirts and standing
> with their backs to the Klansmen.
>
the rest of the world supposing it's stuck behind this slow moving
truck going up a mountain, no passing lane, nothing to do but grin and
bear it. By some analysis of the world, you have Alabama's values
advance by a superpower's, making the rest of the world bow down, but
most people have never heard of Alabama and don't imagine it really
has that kind of power.
>> we still have other regions chomping at the bit to make
>> meaningful contribution to the advancement of our collective human
>> saga. They're not really stuck in line in some sequential pipeline.
>> We're *not* all waiting for the USA to get its act together, praise
>> Bob.
>
> Amen.
though, sounds like Forest Gump has lots to celebrate.
Racism is so on the ropes because genetics found nothing like a "race
gene" and the statistical mappings are too complicated to really
follow, the whole nomenclature breaks down (unless you keep it on life
support, but that gets old too).
Scientific American did a cover on the race issue recently, agreeing
to still see some relevance, in terms of correlating DNA markers with
illnesses (disorders). Mostly what people imagine as "race" is really
"ethnicity" which is a "meme thing" not a "gene thing".
We had these discussions again recently on the Diversity list within
Python, team owned, archive open to members only, but anyone can
join...
>
>> Iceland has been doing a good job, as has Ireland... South Africa.
>> I'm proud of many nations.
>
> Check out Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal.
>
>> Some of our newest curriculum modules, for example these four new ones
>> on Wikieducator coming through my corner (including Martian Math)
>> maybe won't develop a following in Portland, Oregon, my home town,
>> despite my being on hand to teach it, share it with other teachers.
>>
>> Perhaps my true fan base is in Vilnius or Gothenberg?
>
> Certainly Andrius Kulikauskus is there, running Minciu Sodas and
> working on a math book for Earth Treasury.
>
>> Given the Internet, that's not necessarily a problem, although I'd
>> prefer to have more team members locally (working on recruiting,
>> including through Pauling House). Thanks to Wikieducator, I'm already
>> finding a new community of collaborators.
>
> We also have the FLOSS Manuals, Squeakland, MIT and other Ed schools,
> OLE, Creative Commons ccLearn, various museums, and others involved.
> Also the state of California digital textbook program and the Open
> Access movement, and more. See Stacy Reed's
> http://www.librarianchick.com/ for available materials.
>
>> Web 2.0 is like that.
>> OLPC/XO is going to introduce a lot more children into this privileged
>> way of networking and I'm quite happy about that (during the Duke's
>> event, we upgraded one of my two XOs, to a more recent version of the
>> system (767)).
>
> Exactly.
>
>> Kirby
>
be sure to agitate for Martian Math and its connected modules.
There's a lot of Python in there, and Sugar's Pippy application is
right there. With PEP 3003, maybe Pippy will have time to jump to 3.x
with the stronger Unicode support. Or maybe that's happened already.
My tutorials on Generators (PYTHON_TUTORIALS) anticipate this
development.
Kirby
>
> --
> Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
> Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
> The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
> http://www.earthtreasury.org/
>
> >
>
kirby urner
> On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Edward Cherlin <eche...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> < trim >
>
> So we're in agreement on that score. Good news about the Old South
> though, sounds like Forest Gump has lots to celebrate.
>
Just to share some pedigree, our Urner Family genealogy was first
authored in 1893 by Isaac N. Urner, LL.D., late president of
Mississippi College, Clinton. My mother's branch of the family also
headquartered in Florida for many years, and I went to high school
there initially (in Florida). My eldest daughter Alexia moved to
Tennessee awhile back (she's since returned to Oregon). My company
currently shares offices with a corporate refugee from Savannah,
Georgia, completely authentic. My wife was from Satellite Beach (also
Florida).
These are details one might slip in to my autobiography, already a
subpage of my Wikieducator user page.
> Racism is so on the ropes because genetics found nothing like a "race
> gene" and the statistical mappings are too complicated to really
> follow, the whole nomenclature breaks down (unless you keep it on life
> support, but that gets old too).
Kirby