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Day 223 - Learning to use computers by LShave

Here is today’s leading #edchat question:

How does the internet change the role of content and prior knowledge?

It doesn’t. Kids still need a personal stake in both to create meaning.  While everyone can learn content and has prior-knowledge, school-valued content and prior knowledge remain commodities that some have and some do not.  I would further argue that how kids access that information outside school has changed a lot more than classroom practice inside school. Think about the types of information students pursue on their own time in accordance with their own interests. They know where to go and what to search for regarding their passions, hobbies, interests, and fads.  I think kids are used to learning at a faster pace outside of school than inside.  The relevance of what students are learning and their specialization in search tools speeds up the pace of learning for them. Because we still insist on a curriculum being a curriculum and a school year being a school year (and a $14.95 unit is a $14.95 unit, and a mini-lesson is 5-15 minutes, dammit!), we educators often keep ourselves from re-imagining learning through personal, rather than curricular, connections at a different pace. It’s like when Vger DMed Earth and it took an outsider like Spock to realize humanity’s “child” was on Twitter, not email.  See scene 175.  I mean, obviously. K1RK GOT PWNED, NOOB! FAIL! I was totally ROFL.

At school, however, most students are still told what to research and how to research it. They’re told what to learn and how to learn it (Question: in paragraph 3, is the underlined phrase ROFL figurative or literal, and how does the reader know?). Choice of browser, search tool, and/or subject can sometimes cloak schoolwork in relevancy, but I don’t see many teachers, myself included, radically changing classroom practice specifically in response to the amount of information and access points provided by the Internet and associated instructional technology. I still struggle to balance inquiry and test prep in making design decisions.

Then again, while I encourage students to Google it whenever possible, I’ve never been a fan or practitioner of the research project. Teachers who have incorporated the Internet into research projects, what’s worked for you and your students? How have new opportunities to find information changed the way you teach students how to gather, analyze, and use it? How has the Internet changed student research habits?

I wonder if a next step isn’t to elevate the search to an art form complete with peer critique. How much more would students learn about the what and the how if we ran conversational search seminars? What if students brought stuck or failed searches to the table and then talked or messaged with one another about the best ways to find relevant information? What if we crowd-sourced both the relevance and the rigor of search lessons to students and their relationships?

I don’t think technology has changed to role of content or background knowledge in learning, but I think it continues to change how we collect information and what we do with it. How else should I look at the question, PLN? How do you think the role of content and prior knowledge have, indeed, changed? Has access given them a new primacy? Has standardized testing? Or is the purpose of instructional technology to package content and prior knowledge for quicker assimilation into more rigorous work?

How do we get better at helping students learn how and why? How do we take advantage the ways that technology speeds up the what? How do we involve students in all this content and prior knowledge?  The questions remain the same.

Disclaimer: I still want my giant iPhone.

(Answer: figurative or literal – either way the question is illogical.)

Relationships come first in a joyful classroom. Students’ success and their enjoyment of it depend on positive relationships at school. Certainly, students need to feel safe around their classmates in order to take the academic risks that lead to meaning-making. Students unwilling to share any of themselves with others will have a hard time constructing personal connections to class content or benefiting from social learning.

neuron disruption by autovac

Students also need positive, personal relationships with content. Relevance is the bridge and the filter between students and all the information now available in the world. Irrelevant content has a hard time making inroads to students’ neural networks of knowledge, comprehension, connection, and experience; whereas, relevant content fits right into comforting and enjoyable patterns and connections of prior knowledge. The squiggly lines of relevance connect the boxy shapes of content.

Of course, positive relationships between students and teachers also help children engage with their learning. However, I wonder if the fundamental nature of the student-teacher relationship is changing. I wonder if we can grasp the change and adapt to it. I wonder if a major shortcoming of the status quo its participants’ resistance to adopting a new kind of relationship between teachers and students.

If what it means to be a teacher is changing, then don’t we have to change our relationships with students?

Teachers have to change how they treat students. Students have to change how their view teachers. Parents have to change their expectations. Administrators have to change their notions of classroom management.

And I’m not talking about coaching. I’m not sure that metaphor fits our most resistant students for whom changing the status quo is most important. In my experience, very few of these students play team sports or respond any more positively to coaches than teachers because both are authority figures. The students we need to reach the most don’t respond well to extrinsic authority, and I suspect that more successful students would rather not have to pretend like they do, either.

Part of me wants to say “conductor,” but conductors carry authority. I don’t know that authority is advancing the profession of teaching. I don’t know that authority is a perk of accountability anymore.

What is something that is decentralized, but organized? A nervous system? An audience? A republic? What captures a teacher’s duties to bureaucracy and responsibilities to individual students? What acknowledges a teacher’s primacy in the life of a classroom while equating it to students’ self-efficacy and success?

Maybe it’s not a new metaphor, but a new definition that I crave. A set direction. A compass bearing. A nod. But we’re in the middle of the messy work of confronting our own outdated educational system and a world set to overtake American accomplishments in the information age. We need an agenda for change. We need a mandate for innovation. We need new assessments to drive new thinking in how we structure school and teach class.

Innovation by Vermin Inc

And we need that agenda to be authentic to ourselves.

In the absence of anything new in the policies, standards, or assessment of the status quo, take a night to define teaching for yourself. Look at your relationship with your profession. Which moments have made your work authentic and relevant to you?

Look back at what you’ve accomplished. Look ahead to what you want to accomplish. Look in all of your work for your best self. How does that teacher do it? How does that teacher plan such authentic, engaging work? How does that teacher spark a smile on the face of that student? How does that teacher communicate with parents and convince administrators that new ideas will work?

How does that teacher innovate, instead of replicate?

How do we become those teachers now? What do we need to get their jobs done? When do we found our republics of change?