After a wonderful and reflective summer I’m readying myself for a new school year at a new board in a new city. Though I will be shifting to part-time teaching in order to write a book, I am enthusiastic about the opportunity to meet diverse learners in varied learning communities throughout this region. In the absence of curriculum and course planning for the year, I’ve been meditating on different “back to school” priorities and missions – our own, our boards and those of our students.
My first-year teaching at an inner city school was one of the most challenging, yet rewarding, of my life. Despite five years instructing post-graduate industry tech courses at the college level, I was very much the noob high school teacher. But it wasn’t just any high school but a program for at-risk learners, aged 18-20, who had been out of school for several years and dealing with significant academic, life and social issues. As a formerly at-risk youth, I saw it as a chance to make a real difference as a teacher. As a media teacher with a computer lab, it was an opportunity for innovation.
My first big insight transitioning from post-secondary to secondary was that all my cool webby projects wouldn’t fill an empty classroom where chronic attendance issues weren’t so much a matter of compelling curriculum as serious social crises. Every week, I worked overtime to create the most differentiated and meaningful lesson content for students who arrived up to an hour late for my 2.5 hour class. I drew on their lived experiences, interests and backgrounds – from designing Photoshop “Wallpapers” that mixed real and fantasy worlds to remix music videos – I found myself struggling to accommodate problems that had nothing to do with my curriculum.
Dean Shareski, one of my favourite educators to follow on Twitter, recently put together a great presentation on reputation management and social media for schools that I wanted to reshare. This presentation will be of special interest to educational administrators, communications officers and information stakeholders in schools and schoolboards. From his website description:
I am a big fan of Dean’s presentations, all of which help to put Canada on the map for innovative approaches to education and learning. Of note, I recommend you view and bookmark Dean’s “2 guys from Saskatchewan” with (another favourite) Alec Couros who puts the “open” in open education. For the record, I think these two guys are the best thing to come out of the prairies since (my hero) Tommy Douglas.
A backstory of collaboration
When I read that Dean was in need of material and ideas for a new presentation I tweeted that I’d created a similar presentation and would be happy to share. In sharing the material I entered into a social contract that Dean, Alec, myself and many other educators are trying to advocate. This belief in the power of collaboration (versus proprietary and exclusivity) is at the foundation of my philosophy of education and social empowerment in general. But where’s the pay off, you ask?
You see, I’ve already benefited – cognitively, professionally and otherwise – from Dean’s work and ideas by following him in Twitter. While I likely couldn’t provide an annotated list of his specific contributions to my thinking, I can say that he’s one of many people who have helped to define my point of view. I’m only too happy to give something back to a knowledge economy that has so obviously benefited me. What I’m talking about is a culture of reciprocation that everyone benefits from, what Howard Rheingold has termed “new way collaboration” (see his TED Talk here). As Gilberto Gil contends, human beings and everything on this earth are very literally a result of collaboration – and so is culture.
A few minutes into his talk, Dean modeled a very generous bit of citation (thank you Dean!) that also serves to illustrate a creative way to acknowledge others contributions to our work. I certainly plan to adopt this, more personal, approach in my next presentation …
FURTHER VIEWING
Beyond Blocking: Embracing the Social Web
My presentation for the Canadian Association of Communicators in Education
Every day I read the tweets of fellow educators it’s clear that the battle for technology adoption is still going strong. It’s also clear that endless panics – moral and otherwise – are a part of the problem. Just today, wired educator and author Will Richardson described the challenge of teaching critical (technological) literacies without access to the tools and services our students actually use:
I’m with Will 100% and feel this literacy extends to video games and virtual worlds as well. For example, as a media teacher, it’s difficult to address questions of representation and racism in Grand Theft Auto or the violence of first person shooters without the actual texts. Because Facebook, World of Warcraft and Xbox are all, quite properly, primary media texts rich with opportunities for inquiry-based learning. They are also corporate spaces and products with enormous ideological, social and cultural consequences, which leads me to the question of HOW we’re teaching with technology – not just the what or why (which we’ve all more than spoken to).
Advocacy or promotion?
The good news is, there’s no shortage of open pedagogy circulating throughout the web. The bad news is there is still a profound absence of critical inquiry, equity, differentiation and other, more fundamental, objectives collectively referred to as “critical pedagogy.” Sign in to Twitter and you’ll read far more chatter about the latest apps than any real problems, challenges and issues in education.
For some time now I’ve been arguing that genuinely “emergent” pedagogy has little if anything to do with technology. That the vital priorities for digital education concern largely social, cognitive and civic engagement – not the absence or presence of a particular device in your classroom. This informs how I use technology in my own classroom and my desire for a more expanded notion of what we call “classroom2.0″ beyond products and panics.
In my ongoing quest to locate the pedagogical value of games (via game play, research and dialogue), I have come across an interesting example of situated learning in WoW: The random dungeon, or “PUG.”
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, here is an excellent and educator friendly overview.
Rather than duplicating this description above, I’d like to talk about some of my own, personal, observations and experiences in PUGS and why I think they have value as a form of (radical) gaming-focused PD for educators. Yes, this post is about our / your learning – not that of our students. And when it comes to gaming and education, I feel that it’s educators – not students – who are most in need of emergent “literacy.”
And before I say anything further, the first and foremost reason you should explore PUGs? they’re F-U-N.
After close to ten years of watching my other half blast his way through massively multiplayer worlds (MMOs), I decided this was just too big a phenomena for me to avoid. Not only that, but I felt I couldn’t really continue to call myself a “gamer” if I hadn’t played an MMO – let alone the most significant MMO of all time. So I joined wow and started living part of my life as a Night Elf Druid.
As you may know, I am enthusiastic about the virtues of games and virtual worlds for learning and I have been advocating on this for some time now. But before I write about all the fun things I’ve seen and done in wow, I want to explore some of the ideological and ethical questions around the use of a corporate gamespace for learning. I’m particularly interested in examining wow through the lens of critical pedagogy.For those unfamiliar:
“Critical pedagogy is a teaching approach grounded in critical theory. Critical pedagogy attempts to help students question and challenge domination, and the beliefs and practices that dominate. In other words, it is a theory and practice of helping students achieve critical consciousness.”
I am focused here on what the game creators have produced, not the alternative player cultures that have emerged around that (the subject of my next post). Without question, any space can be transformed by its users. But that does not negate questioning the architecture – particularly the ideological architecture – that players must inhabit.
My first machinima – Virtual World Learning v. H1N1
The above “news report” on H1N1 and virtual worlds is part of an assignment I just completed for an additional qualification course in Media at York University. The idea was to create two news reports in two different media. I chose to do a print story (forthcoming) and an emergent media form: machinima. As n00b as this piece is, it took me the better part of last week and most of this weekend to complete.
In addition to hooking up my guest with the right speech and arm animations (to make his avatar move and talk) I had innumerable challenges with Wegame, the only free gaming capture tool that plays well with SL (if you can think of another, better one, please comment below!). Given my limited movie editing capabilities I put the project together in Windows Movie Maker.
Just imagine what students could create!
What excites me the most is the prospect of doing stuff like this with students.
Unfortunately, teaching in the public system at the secondary level means I am not allowed to take my students into spaces like Second Life (or, at least, not that I am yet aware). So perhaps we can start by creating “remix” machinima using sampled, public domain content from the Internet Archive. I’ll post a lesson plan when I get there. Continue reading My first machinima
Last week, one of my media course (ed PD) classmates talked about the ongoing struggle to help students make sense of the flood of information online. She cited a negative experience with wikipedia, which resulted in an energetic exchange about the merits (and challenges) with open online content.
It’s not about “authority” nor should it be
As a long time defender of the open web and open content, I wanted to point out that the educational bias towards “authoritative” or “received” sources, though relevant, is also highly political/ideological – especially in relation to emergent sources of knowledge (i.e., Open Content). Ideological in the contexts of: 1) who has access or control of the means of knowledge power and production 2) who endorses or authorizes those voices and 3) “what” forms are accepted as “valid”.
Knowledge power paradigm shifts
The power paradigm shift is not unique to education (see also Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions), it is the source of the crisis in every form of traditional knowledge power – from publishing and media/print news to television and, finally, education – power bases that are currently disintegrating under their inability to evolve from top down to bottom up models (or a healthy blend of both). Things are changing – rapidly. And much of the change concerns shifting power bases. In my view, it’s very simple: adapt or perish (though one can adapt critically and with creativity – adaptation mustn’t be confused with unthinking, mindless adoption).
Scaffolding “open” (is the answer)
To me, the bigger question here is who and what, precisely, are “authoritative” and why? And are the structures supporting their authority really truly agile enough to ensure their relevance (i.e., traditional peer review process v. online – and open – models where hundreds of thousands of people can evaluate and rate a document along with a selected few).
Many of my students are well aware of my issues with the “conspiracy” sites they enjoy visiting. I’ve explained why these sites are bogus – they get that. And they’re familiar with the alternatives – thing is, as a group of marginalised students who have experienced systemic racism and other inequities they distrust a lot of what we might call authority. Problem is, the depth of prior knowledge required to unpack the real reasons for these inequities isn’t easily (or quickly) acquired. And without that prior knowledge, the idea that a few websites could explain it all via an entertaining conspiracy is more appealing. Young people are looking for alternatives — alternatives to old power bases. We must teach inquiry and critical thinking, not deference to “approved” sources.
The issue with wikipedia isn’t credibility or merit, it’s how to effectively use an open source like this. For example, going directly to the “external links” and “notes” sections at the bottom of every wikipedia page, habits of traditional scholarly critique (i.e., checking citations, sources and the end notes – which allows you to discern the bias, depth or quality of research). This way, you, the reader, can go directly to the “legitimate” sources and verify their value or merit for yourself.
Crap detection (doesn’t mean dissing the web)
Teachers (and students) alike need to learn a new literacy. The literacy to “detect crap” online – without simply reproducing old power structures (or dissing emergent, democratic knowledge models). And this is where I turn it over to Howard Rheingold who makes sense of the why and how of crap detection with the most seasoned perspective I’ve seen. From his City Brights blog:
“Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research. Some critics argue that a tsunami of hogwash has already rendered the Web useless. I disagree. We are indeed inundated by online noise pollution, but the problem is soluble. The good stuff is out there if you know how to find and verify it. Basic information literacy, widely distributed, is the best protection for the knowledge commons: A sufficient portion of critical consumers among the online population can become a strong defense against the noise-death of the Internet.
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The issue of info pollution has been on my mind since at least 1994, when I wrote “The Tragedy of the Electronic Commons” about the infamous Canter and Siegel – the first Internet spammers. A few years later, I personally confronted the importance of teaching information literacy to 14 year olds when I watched my daughter come of age at the same time online search engines became available. I sat down in front of the circa-1999 computer with my daughter and explained that most of the books she could get from the library could be counted on to be factually accurate. But when you enter words into a search engine, there is no guarantee that your search will lead you to accurate information. “You have to do some investigation before you accept anything you find online,” I warned her.”
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