Ed Tech Academy Takeaway — Day Two

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Yesterday was the second, final day of Roane State’s Ed Tech Academy. Donn King was our keynote and afternoon presenter. He spoke and presented on the role of teachers in the Internet age. His afternoon presentation offered practical advice to faculty who have flipped their class or are considering the inverted model. We also had excellent presentations on the use of iPads in the classroom (David and Ronda Blevins) and challenge-based learning (Dr. Jeff Horner and Dr. Abigail Goosie).

I don’t plan to walk through each session here. You can do that for yourself by following  #rscceta on Twitter.

My takeaway from day two is this: Teachers and librarians who believe their main responsibility is to transfer information to their students are doomed to frustration. The internet can transfer information faster, easier and better than any person can.

Mere information has become so easily shared that it is often wasteful and counterproductive to spend lots of class time transmitting information. There are exceptions, but this is true most of the time. When we lecture over content available in the textbook or review notes verbatim, we devalue the importance of those resources and undermine opportunities to connect with our students. Information transfer is not what teaching is about. Information is plentiful. Context is scarce. As Donn puts it, speaking outloud is for big picture context; writing is for detail.

I think about this often when writing an email inviting people to do something – attend an event or take a survey, for example. I have learned that most people only read short, actionable emails, and so, I often try to pare my message down to a few attention-getting sentences with a link to more information.

The same is true with teaching. Our direct instruction time with our students is limited.  Attention spans are limited. Cognitive load theory tells us that our students, no matter their age, won’t remember most of what we tell them. They will actually remember very little. Rather than play roulette with their learning, we can be more successful by focusing most of our time on helping them understand a few important ideas or concepts and then connect them with the resources to dig deeper and discover the detail. Students can’t really learn without first understanding why they need to learn. Connecting students to the “why” is the challenge and province of the teacher. This work requires creativity and persistence. This work is the connecting path to those lightbulb moments. Working with the goal of context rather than information transfer makes teaching much more meaningful. Working with the goal of context rather than information transfer makes teaching a whole lot of fun.

Ed Tech Academy Takeaway — Day 1

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Today was Day 1 of my college’s annual Ed Tech Academy. Ed Tech Academy is our annual professional development conference around issues related to teaching, online education and classroom technology. I had the honor of working with a team of great people to plan, market and deliver this year’s academy.

Today’s keynote speaker was Dr. Mark Milliron, Chancellor for Western Governors University Texas. He has worked with the Gates Foundation, NISOD, Civitas and the League for Innovation in Community Colleges among other organizations. That’s not what’s important about him. What is most impressive about Dr. Milliron is his ability to talk about the changes in higher education in a way that makes sense. He connects the dots.

The past year has been a swirl of new ideas, technologies and potentially “disruptive” innovations in online and traditional instruction. My college is working with iPads, eText, textless courses, flipped classes, open education resources, and, most recently, MOOCs. It is a fascinating time to be a teacher. It is also nerve-racking.

With all the new tools and technologies, it is very easy to loose sight of our purpose. Here’s a secret. None of these technologies matter unless they can help students connect to their own sense of purpose, tenacity and engagement. Students cannot learn unless they have a clear sense of why they want to learn. Students cannot learn until they are committed to working hard and sacrificing immediate gratification for a future reward. Students cannot learn unless they actively participate in the process and can contribute to the goals of the class. Milliron talks more about this in his article “An Open Letter to Students: You’re the Game Changer in Next-Generation Learning“.

There has been an ongoing conversation about student engagement for several years. I have heard the term “student engagement” so often, I have forgotten what it means. There is, I think, a tendency to conflate engagement with entertainment and make engagement equivalent to interest. That is a lazy way to think about engagement. Engagement is about responsibility. Engaged students take responsibility for their own learning. This still feels like a magical pass phrase, something students are given or give.

My big takeaway is this: students can’t take real responsibility for their learning until educators find meaningful ways  to share real-time feedback about how students are performing. Amazon and Ebay do this with online shopping. Pandora and Spotify do this with music. Why can’t we do this with learning? The trick is gathering data about how students interact with their classes and then develop an algorithm that can offer real-time predictions about how likely a particular student is to succeed based on specific actions taken by that student. In other words, we need to figure out how to gather lots and lots of data points about student success, use that data to extrapolate predictive models of student success and then boil all of that down into a simple, easy-to-understand message to students about specific actions they might take to be more successful.

Let me put this another way: the challenge before us is to make learning very, very personal. We need to find ways to personalize the learning environment to present learning resources and challenges that are personally meaningful to the specific learner and then offer real-time advice on how students interact with that course. It would be very powerful if librarians, teachers and other learning professionals could figure out a way to curate and recommend specific learning resources for specific learners in specific situations. To offer a video, animation or infographic that best meets the learner’s needs at that exact moment in the same way that Amazon recommends a specific shirt with a pair of pants.

The technology is available. We just need to figure out how to use it.

Leadership is about Standing Between

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I still have a lot to learn about leadership. I am slow to delegate, leave projects unfinished and am miserably poor at moving paper from file A to file B. Whatever success I have had as a leader has come from three qualities: I don’t mind being uncomfortable; I am okay with uncertainty; and I enjoy standing between departments to get the really interesting work done.

For the past 6 months, I have been serving my college as Interim Dean of Student Academic Services. This assignment is almost at an end and I have enjoyed the experience very much. In this role I have had the chance to work with my team in the library as well as work more closely with the Center for Teaching Arts, Technology and Distance Ed and the Learning Centers.

These departments are natural allies. All are aligned to develop, organize and deliver the resources and services our students and faculty need to maximize learning. Working together, we have accomplished a lot. We have developed an online plagiarism tutorial, conducted mock research “hospital” workshops, piloted faculty development webinars, implemented classroom iPad pilots, organized a professional development academy and much more.

We did these things. I did not.

I used to think of a leader as someone who stands in front of people to show them the way forward. It is, I think, sometimes more accurate to think of a leader as someone who stands between people to show them the goals and talents they have in common and help them figure out new, interesting ways to put those common interests and gifts to work. That is, at least, the kind of leader I aspire to be.

Pimp This Poem: Spring Bloom

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Here’s a poem I wrote three or four years ago. I have been tinkering with it off and on ever since. The poem is about a moment years ago when I was taking out the trash and was surprised by the promiscuous beauty of my neighbor’s pear tree illuminated from behind by a street light. The light poured through the soft, white flowers. She seemed very much like an angel, alive and glorious, glowing from within with a pure but sensuous light.

I am explaining too much. I am thinking I may submit this to a local literary arts magazine. I am interested in comments, feedback, semi-rotten tomatoes.

In other words, please pimp this poem.

***

Spring Bloom

The girl next door stands ready at the gate.
Her long, lithe limbs linger. She beckons me
with burgeoning blooms, her open invitation hands.
She is bathed in streetlight – radiant, clean, gleaming
from the inside with a promise. No one is awake.
The night protects us, our anonymous secret.
I have an idea, I tell her.
I know you do, she says. She always knows
exactly what to say.

Term Papers Kill Readers

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I am a librarian at a community college in east Tennessee. This week is finals week. Today is Sunday. Right now, dozens (possibly hundreds) of students are pouring their twenty-first cup of coffee to recapture the energy of last night’s all-nighter. They are writing term papers, hopefully revising them. They are casting words onto a screen much like a gambler casts dice, hoping some of the words turn up lucky and reveal a pattern in an otherwise meaningless spray.

As teachers, this is not what we hope they are doing. We hope they are deeply engaged in the creative digestion of everything they have learned with us this term and are making a careful synthesis of something new, brilliant and insightful that comes directly from that secret, genius-place in their brains.

Unfortunately, that will not happen. We won’t read those papers because we don’t ask for those papers. What if we did? What would that assignment look like? Possibly something like Kurt Vonnegut’s end of term assignment.

How would we grade it? Don’t know. Don’t care. If I could allow a student to be passionate and then force them to share that passion with others, my semester would have been a complete success.

Brick Wall

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Sometimes the words hide behind a brick wall. You are standing at the wall, staring, trying to knock it over with your mind. You are pushing at the bricks with your thoughts, trying to break the mortar and send them tumbling backward. This is foolish. Thoughts cannot push down a wall.

Then you take a deep breath and you assail the wall with aspirations. You sit at the wall, pretending at patience. You are sitting in the gathering stew of expectation, letting the feeling of wanting to write swell until it is a physical thing that might swallow you and the space you are sitting in and the wall itself. As if the wall itself might be digested in your patient, honest intention. The words stack up. The wall does not move.

And then you are cursing the wall, hurtling insults, outlandish, brutal and impolite. You batter the wall with words of your own, but these are not the helpful kind of words. These words diminish you and make the wall loom larger.  You bash yourself against the brick with impatience, spreading bruises and injury. You are hurting now, self-inflicted, but your pain is no kind of key that can pass through this wall.

Be still. Gather your wits. Consider the situation. There are words. There is a wall. The words are piled up like treasure against the other side of the wall. And there is you, standing on the wordless side, thinking, wishing, cursing and pressing. It is not working.

You cannot push over a wall with your mind. You can’t break mortar with aspiration. You may curse, cajole and plead with the wall, but the wall is not moved.

Try something different. Grab a hammer. Pick up the pin. Write.

The Crisis in Higher Ed

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There is a crisis in American higher education. Surely you must  have heard about it. It is always in the news. It has something to do with tuition and textbook costs and tenured faculty and student learning assessments and competencies and marketable skills and jobs that don’t exist yet. Or it has to do with student engagement and persistence to completion. Except we aren’t exactly sure what completion means — is it a degree or a certificate or a credential of some kind? Perhaps a feeling of satisfaction or a job hire that suits a person’s skills and interests.

The fix is pretty easy. It involves just one thing. Our best people are working on deciding which one thing it is going to be. Perhaps mobile technology or accelerated courses or free textbooks or open courseware or MOOCs. Stay tuned.

I’m not usually snarky but my head is swimming lately with the sense of urgency that has seized the legislators and administrators standing outside my profession. We are moving at light speed to innovate but can’t easily define our goals. We are eager to demonstrate agility and a willingness to make tough choices but we can’t articulate the nature of those choices and why we have to choose so quickly.

I am not being retrograde. I know the world has changed and we all need to adapt. The internet has matured, and things are possible now that were not possible just a few years ago. We can build administrative processes at web scale. We can design learning systems that capture real-time data about how students learn and then return that data directly to students in real-time to improve their own understanding about their own learning. We can mitigate distance with cheap or free web conferencing tools. We have developed flipped pedagogies and hybrid course delivery modes to blend synchronous and asynchronous learning environments.

I want to adapt. I want to help improve things. I want to help figure out how to use these great new tools we have so that students can learn better, faster and more deeply than ever before. I want to help build an education system that recognizes the strengths of individual students and can offer personalized learning at the point of need so that we can prevent the waste of potential talent that, today, many accept as inevitable.

I want to help people discover what they are passionate about learning and then wrap skills and resources around that passion to create opportunities for genius.

Before I can do that, I need someone to tell me what we want the world to look like and what we need these students to be able to do. There are amazingly smart, compassionate, dedicated teachers and staff in our colleges and universities ready to do whatever it takes to get there. We just need someone to make it simple, make it clear. Give us a picture of the necessary future, give us the tools and permission to use those tools and then get out of the way.

Blank on Blank: Recommended Website

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The roots of our culture are oral — storytelling, Homeric epics, parables, sermons, the Socratic way of teaching.

The roots of our culture are also visual — cave paintings, canvas paintings, sculpture, architecture, pottery, television, movies.

Of course, the roots of our culture are also textual — poems, novels, essays, articles.

There is a strong urge to pull these modes apart and make them each separate means of expression. I say no. Give me the mash-up. Give me the Blank on Blank Animated Interviews project.

Blank on Blank is a terrific podcast series in which professional journalists are encouraged to donate tapes from their unpublished archives so that listeners can benefit from the deep cuts of journalistic history, the stories behind the stories that no one ever got to hear. The podcast is eclectic and deeply fascinating, featuring interviews with people like Bono, Muhammed Ali, Christina Ricci, Alan Ginsberg and Dave Brubeck. The subjects discussed are similarly varied.

The problem with the podcast is that the audio quality is not always good. This is probably due to limits in the source tape. Since I listen to podcasts exclusively in the car, the audio quality is a big concern. I can’t hear muddy tones over the roar of my care tires.

That’s one reason why I was so grateful to discover the Blank on Blank video project, in which the source tapes are illustrated with an animated video. The video makes these interviews feel more alive and entertaining. I am a big fan.

As a librarian, one of the things I do is curate content and tell people where they should go to read, listen and learn. I am telling you to visit the Blank on Blank project. There are only a few videos posted so far, but this is a great idea and they deserve a great audience.

Here’s Jim Morrison explaining why fat is beautiful and Dave Brubeck on fighting communism with jazz. Enjoy.

Why I Write

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I have been in a bit of a fallow period word-wise lately. I tell myself it is because work is so busy and my head is full of the ten thousand things that need to be done. Life is hectic, but I can’t lay my unplanned hiatus at the feet of my day job.

Energy can also be a problem. Some days after being a librarian and a dad and a husband, my battery wanes and I crash at the end of the day. My family and my work are important to me. The energy is properly placed but energy is a finite resource and easily depleted. Also true, but not the core issue.

I had the chance to spend some time with my friend Daryl yesterday. He and I talked about our writing. He is having some good success with two self-published novels and a recently published short story. His work is getting finished and into the world.

My work is not getting finished. We talked about why. He asked why I write. Is it the story, the characters or the ideas that draw you?

“It’s the language”, I said immediately, without giving any thought. “It is the words.”

One day later, I realize that isn’t the truth. It isn’t the words exactly, or, at least, it isn’t only the words.

I write for the surprise of the words. I write to understand what I know and believe. I am a person who thinks out loud. I don’t always understand my own thoughts unless I can hear them out loud. Writing is that way. Writing carries thoughts, ideas and impressions out of my head and onto a screen so I can see clearly and compare how the idea fits.

I also write for the surprise of story. There are people living their own lives, having their own situations, that rise up from me when I sit at the keys. These people rise and walk quite independent from me, yet they are from me and they are me. It is strange and exhilarating to discover fully formed lives, situations and ideas that do not appear to be me but somehow become more me than my own breath.

And as I meet these people, I am meeting myself. Which brings me to the main answer to the question. Why do I write? I write to meet myself. This kind of writing gets messy. This kind of writing becomes contradictory. I write to embrace the extraordinarily generous gift Walt Whitman gave to us in saying, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then. I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”

This, then, is the best way I can answer my own question. Why do I write? I write to make visible the contradiction inside myself. I write to celebrate that contradiction. I write because I am large. I write because I contain multitudes.

Be Authentic. Help Others Be Authentic.

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Lately, I have been given opportunities to try on some new responsibilities at work. It has been fun. Today I was able to serve on the panel that selects the college’s President’s Award winner. This award is the highest honor given to a student at our school. Candidates are nominated by faculty and staff and then vetted for  academic performance, community service and extracurricular involvement.

Here’s the thing. All the students we interviewed were excellent. Each comes from a different walk of life with different obstacles, experiences and academic accomplishments. All of their bona fides were uniformly impressive. Their resumes and GPAs stack nicely.

Here’s the other thing. None of that stuff matters. What impressed me most about each of the students I met was his or her passion. These students presented their authentic selves. They were comfortable, honest and sometimes delightfully weird.

Every one of these students is going to be a bright light. They seem to know something that other people don’t yet recognize. They understand the power of being themselves.

These students are passionate about their lives and their learning. They understand how the work they are doing and the sacrifices they are making relate to their future selves.

One student is passionate about mathematics. Another is passionate about caring for others. Another is passionate about snowboarding and family. Another about helping others laugh through adversity. These students are really interesting, really talented, really unique people. And I am only now getting to know them.

Some of them have been in my classes. I have helped some in the library or chatted for a few minutes in a hallway, but I had no idea who they really were and what compelled them.

I can’t help feeling cheated. I should have allowed myself to get to know these students much sooner. I should have made these connections on day one. It would have made me a better teacher and mentor. It would have made me a better steward of their time.

I also can’t help wondering who else is sitting in my library, studying quietly. What weird, authentic self is quietly waiting to be recognized.

I can’t help thinking that I should be meeting these students and my first question shouldn’t be “What are you working on?” or “How can I help?” My first question should be “What do you love to learn about?” or “What are you passionate about doing?”

People who work with students should ask these questions first. Probably anybody who works with people should ask these question first. The people around us are talented, energetic and unique. They are greatly gifted. The problem is they may not know it. They may not see it in themselves, but it is there and it is powerful when it is discovered.

The best thing we do for the people who come to us for learning is to authentic with them, listen and encourage them to be authentic too.