Mar 22 2015
Tying it All Together
In all of this, I’ve found myself ranging these ideas from the extremes of open-ended conversation and discussion to lecture style presentation and digital storytelling. I don’t think I have many more answers than I did when I began, but I certainly have many more questions.
If we are trying to model pedagogy that goes beyond ‘sit and get’, what do we do to prepare for a simple presentation? We may create the most stunning presentation, but how do we use images and media that support a conversation rather than lecture? If we don’t know where things might go, which possibilities do we prepare for?
It reminds me a little bit of an experience that I had during my student teaching. My mentor, Sallyann Murphey, was teaching a class called The American Century. She asked me to do a single lesson, 80 minutes, on the rise of jazz in the 1920s and 1930s. I thought a great deal about how to go about it, and realized quickly that a linear, PowerPoint style presentation would be the antithesis of the spirit of jazz. I needed to improvise it.
And yet, the jazz of the 1920s was not an open improvisation. Tunes had melodies, chord changes, and idiosyncrasies that everyone knew. To get ready for my presentation, I outlined the history that I wanted to touch on, edited more than a dozen clips from Ken Burns’ Jazz series that illustrated various points, and then wove them together into a story that was improvised based on my read of the students and the dynamic in the class.
But even an improvisation such as this was still somewhat one-directional (as are most jazz performances). Miles Davis never asked the audience to join in a tune with him – he improvised with players that he knew and trusted. Constructivist pedagogy asks us to do more, to build powerful, meaningful experiences with the class, not for the class.
Into all of these questions enter the lessons and principles of good design that we studied in Course 3. How do we use text, typography, layout, images, sounds, and music to build powerful learning experiences with people we’ve never met before in one hour?
One of the most important lessons in all of this is simplicity. Most of us are aware that people are only able to focusing on 1 cognitively demanding task at a time. Beyond that, things get put on the back-burner and we just check them from time to time. No audience member is able to read text on a slide and listen to a person speak at the same time. In fact, we aren’t even really able to look closely at a photo and still listen; the photo usually functions more as a filter or illustration of the narration rather than as the central focus.
silver falls 21 by Robert Emperley Licensed CC BY-SA 2.0
This Saturday I’ll be presenting “21st Century Problems” one last time (this year, anyway). Although I still plan to use a slide deck and keep a narrative arc to it, my goal is to encourage exploration as we walk along that path. This will be the fifth time I’ve led the presentation, and each time I think it’s gotten a bit more to what I would like it to be. Although it’s taken over a year and things still aren’t what I’d like them to be, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Apr 12 2015
Tech integrate or not tech integrate…
When we talk about the meaning of tech integration, we have to first start with the meaning of technology. The best definition of technology that I’ve heard comes from Alan Kay, who said in the 1980s that “Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.” (Wikiquote) Perhaps his most famous quote is “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
What’s fascinating to me about this definition is that it shows that our understanding of technology is inherently subjective; there is no objective reason why we talk about technology as computers and electronics but not pencils, chalkboards, and scissors.
Kay’s colleague Danny Hillis expanded on the definition when he said in an interview that “I think technology is all the stuff that doesn’t work yet” (Newsweek, “Disney’s Wizards”).
In his article “99% Invisible” for the New Media Consortium (that of the Horizon Report), Tom Haymes writes that “Unless you are a technician or technologist, the central function of technology should be as an invisible augmentation of the hard tasks we face every day.” From the perspective of Harris, once technology functions actually works and invisibly it actually ceases to be technology, much like chairs are not seen as technology.
Douglas_adams_portrait.jpg: michael hughes from berlin, germany derivative work: Beao (Douglas_adams_portrait.jpg) [CC BY-SA 2.0
Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
If we talk about meaning of ‘tech integration’ it seems to me that we are talking about teaching and learning where technology isn’t seen as ‘technology’ but rather just a part of the lesson. In that sense, despite Jeff Utecht’s objections over the term, the term ‘integration’ is in my mind an appropriate one. To ‘integrate’ comes from the Latin integrat, which meant ‘made whole’. It seems that is our goal – to make technology as much a part of a lesson as people or pedagogy, not something in addition but something that is part of the whole.
And yet, as we see from Alan Kay’s definition of technology, there is something almost generational that makes technology been seen as technology rather than an integral part of the learning experience. While Douglas’ age cut off at 30 is perhaps more figurative than literal, it does point to the bewilderment that many people feel towards change and technology later in their lives.
This, then, is the challenge of technology integration: we must reverse the psychology age of teachers so that they all have the wonder of youth, and we must make the latest technology as integral a part of learning as chairs, paper and people.
And yet, as I commented in an article from Edutopia, that’s not quite it either. If we talk about Tech Integration Specialists, we are talking about an oxymoron: technology that is integrated into a curriculum is not thought of as ‘technology’ as such, it is simply part of teaching and learning.
Rather than looking at technology integration, I think we should be talking about learning innovation. How do we help teachers and students find the best ideas, practices, and tools to promote learning? Because the teachers, students, tools, and environment are constantly changing, there is no single technique or lesson that we can cling to. Instead, we need to create places of learning that can themselves learn and grow.
Tech integration frameworks like SAMR, TPACK or Grapplings can be useful in this process. My own thinking about SAMR underwent a fairly substantial evolution after I did a workshop with its founder, Ruben Puentedura, last December. I find TPACK more useful for me as a Tech Coordinator than for actual teachers, for it helps me keep in mind the different types of knowledge needed across subject areas. The Grapplings model is somewhat less popular, though in some ways I find it more helpful. The difficulty with it is that (like many interpretations of SAMR) its example seem to downplay the importance of tech literacy as well as ‘transforming’ uses of technology.
I don’t think any of them are particularly helpful as tools to measure where individual teachers are along a spectrum. Even if a teacher could say that they are using technology for ‘Redefinition’, in the TPCK part of the diagram, or using tech transformatively, does that mean that there is nowhere to go or grow?
For myself and in my experience, there is always a way of taking a learning experience up a notch, whether through a change in pedagogy, execution, technology, or conception. This is part of our learning process as teachers, and it is not something that happens in a single lesson, year, or even decade.
By pswanson • Blog • 1