I was listening to “Ain’t too Proud to Beg” coming to work this morning. I’m always surprised what songs actually say when you really listen to the lyrics. Essentially, a number of the things advised by songs can be highly questionable- even in innocent seeming songs from The Temptations. Given that and the predilection of stars to get in legal trouble I came up with this idea. 1
Essentially, identify an innocent seeming song that advocates some odd/criminal behavior and reformat it as a police report style article. My example based on “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg” is below. 2
January, 22, 2012 – Resisting Arrest/Violation of a Restraining Order
Eddie Kendricks, 46, was arrested at his former residence, 12 Jones street, at 4:37AM. Kendricks is accused of stalking and violating an order of protection filed by his former wife, Angela Berry, after their recent divorce.
Kendricks is accused of sleeping on the doorstep of the residence they previously shared. Kendricks is also accused of actively preventing Ms. Berry from leaving her home. Witnesses report that Kendricks often appeared incoherent, at times sobbing and begging at the door of Ms. Berry’s residence for hours at a time.
“At first, it was funny,” reported Berry’s neighbor, Ron Paxton. “We’d laugh at him, a grown man, behaving like that. But then he just wouldn’t stop. Poor Angie couldn’t even leave the house. Something had to be done.”
Prosecutors say more charges may be pending for Kendricks who has defied previous restraining orders and was out on bail at the time of his latest arrest.
Ain’t Too Proud To Beg
I know you wanna leave me,
But I refuse to let you go,
If I have to beg, plead for your sympathy,
I don’t mind ’cause you mean that much to me.Ain’t too proud to beg and you know it,
Please don’t leave me girl,
Don’t you go,
Ain’t too proud to plead, baby, baby,
Please don’t leave me, girl,
Don’t you go.Now I’ve heard a cryin’ man
Is half a man with no sense of pride,
But if I have to cry to keep you,
I don’t mind weepin’ if it’ll keep you by my side.–chorus about begging
If I have to sleep on your doorstep all night and day
Just to keep you from walking away,
Let your friends laugh, even this I can stand,
’cause I wanna keep you any way I can.–chorus about begging
Now I’ve got a love so deep in the pit of my heart,
And each day it grows more and more,
I’m not ashamed to call and plead to you, baby,
If pleading keeps you from walking out that door.–chorus about begging
1 In other news, I’d love to compare when words like “gun” are censored from songs on the radio based on the music type. For instance, Aerosmith’s Janie’s Got A Gun has no censoring but pretty much any rap song has “gun” censored (Even semi-rap like- Everlast’s What It’s Like gets censored.).
2 Bonus points if you can find a song from a singer/rapper actually arrested for that activity (Bobby Brown and a few others come to mind). It is probably too easy to use rap songs about drugs and killing people but set your own bar as high or low as you’d like. I think it’s much more fun if the song seems totally innocent.
Prior warning — A little ways down this page is an actual tweet that uses expletives. It felt stupid to try to blur out the words. If it bothers you don’t read it. I also blurred out information I felt would ID these people or their schools. They are ID’d as being from the general VA area but they aren’t necessarily from the Henrico school system.
I’m briefly talking to our administrators about social media on this coming Tuesday. As a result, I was messing around with some of the ways you can do location-based searches on Twitter. It’s pretty simple, go to the advanced search, add a location and set it to search within 50 miles or so. That allows me to search for “school” or whatever and see results from my area that are likely to be more relevant.1
My goal was to find a few tweets that made my point- that Twitter and other forms of social media can offer a pretty unique insight into the broader conversation occurring around and about your school. I believe that were I a principal, I’d want to be aware of this conversation. If lots of students are saying my school sucks or that it’s awesome, I’d simply like to be aware. That knowledge might impact my actions, it might not. This particular channel might also let me get ahead of things, like fights or parental complaints, before they reached crisis levels.
As I continue to wander and think things through, it gets more complicated. I, without much effort, found images like the one below.2
I don’t know what the legal obligations are for finding something like this. I’m also more than a little fuzzy about the general moral obligations. Were it me, this person seems to need some help.3 That conversation would likely be really difficult. How do you take information like this and act on it in a way that doesn’t make you appear to be big brother? Additionally, if this person is a minor and given your role as a guardian, are you obligated (morally or legally) to inform that person’s parent? There’s about a million questions I have around this and how to use what I believe is important information in a way that doesn’t result in something like what’s going on in the screenshot below.
It seems like schools by default can take this information and use it a very persecutory manner. Our AUP does say the following-
1.Students are prohibited from accessing or attempting to access instant messages, chat rooms, forums, e-mail, message boards, or hosting personal web pages during the instructional day unless authorized by a teacher or administrator for instructional purposes.
and
2. Students shall not reveal unauthorized personal information about themselves or others.
and
5. Students should understand when communicating electronically that their screen name, posted photographs and language represents them online and must meet acceptable use standards.
and finally
6. Students should use technology for school-related purposes only during the instructional day.
There’s also some stuff about bypassing filters and a few other things. Where this could get complicated is that most of our regulations are written under the auspices that students during school would be using our hardware and our network. Given that the majority of tweets I saw were posted via Blackberry and iPhone, that assumption is not so solid any longer. We do have other regulations that prohibit the use of cell phones at school so no matter what you’ve got a Code of Conduct violation that someone could pursue.
I don’t know about the choice of punishing students for posting general things to Twitter. There’s also the opposite issue of making rules and not enforcing them.4 In certain ways it’s also like war-time spies. You don’t burn a resource for trivial gains. You hold on to your resource and use it strategically for the insight it gives you to larger issues. You get into a whole different world of drama and entanglements if negative comments are being published about other students.
It seems like education keeps ending up in a position where it is attempting to govern student expression outside the school. That expression may occur during school hours or after and the impact of this conversation on the learning environment always comes up. I don’t know the answer but I do know that an environment of animosity and a feeling of persecution is not a benefit to anyone. There seems to be an expectation from students that these are their comments in a non-school space and, as such, are seen as at least semi-private. I lost at least one tweet demonstrating that pretty clearly but, as you can seen above, the use of these conversations by school administrators creates some real anger from students in a way that might seem surprising given the public nature of the accounts. In an unhelpful way, I can see both sides of that.
So all this to say that this is a messy, messy place. We have unprecedented access to our students’ personal lives should we choose to pursue that access.5 I’m not sure we know what to do with that access and in many ways life is easier not knowing. Ignorance is a kind of bliss. Knowing is often very complicated. There are a lot of gray areas that are going to become painful places for a lot of people- students, teachers, and administrators for the foreseeable future.
1 I’m not sure exactly how this is determined. I believe it to be from a combination of GPS information from phones and from the location indicated in Twitter profiles- in other words, not the kind of thing I’d bet my life on but good enough for light work.
2 For those of you who need exposition, the phone is showing 4:20 and those are not cigarettes.
3 At a minimum this person might consider options other than documenting illegal drug use online in quite so public a manner.
4 Rewriting the AUP and making some arguments on the overall Student Code of Conduct is on my list of painful things to do that will likely cause people to dislike me.
5 Twitter in this example but it certainly goes across any number of other services.
I know a lot of people have already responded to “If I Were A Poor Black Kid” but no one did it in quite the mocking way I’d hoped for so, as usual, I gave it a shot when I probably should have let it go.
I started off angry and just became more depressed the more I broke it down. There were some possible points in his article but it’s wrapped in such stupidity and arrogance that they’re not worth delineating.
__________________________________________________________________
I am not a pompous white man.1 So life is easier for me. But that doesn’t mean that prospects are impossible for pompous white men. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that the pompous white man should be content with saying obnoxious things to the people in his general physical location. I believe the pompous white man should broadcast his ignorance to the far corners of the globe so that no one is in doubt. Even a poor black kid in West Philadelphia.
It takes egotism. It take banality. It takes an online site dedicated to other pompous white people. It takes the help of people who should know better. It takes the arrogance to enjoy coming across as a pompous jerk who knows little about education and less about technology.
If I were a pompous white man writing about poor black children I would first and most importantly write my article in the whitest online site I could find. Forbes would work if I wasn’t good enough to make it into the Wall St. Journal. Whatever the site, I really want to avoid any actual poor black children reading what I wrote. I would make it my #1 priority to have no real knowledge about what I wrote about. Not only would I not be involved in education, I’d also have no experience with poor children of any color. I wouldn’t care that even my title had grammatical errors. Writing like you have simple answers to complex questions is the key. With enough arrogance, you open all sorts of possibilities. You might even run for political office.
As a pompous white man, I would make sure I didn’t actually know any black children. Or any poor children. I certainly wouldn’t know any actual poor black children. I’d make sweeping generalizations based off of things people I knew told me.2 As a pompous white man even my pity (sadly) would be parenthetical and condescending. I’d make sure to reference an online retailer or two because I care enough to do a Google search for these poor black kids. I’d chalk that up as one more barrier knocked down. Access to technology- check!
If I were a pompous white man I’d reference a bunch of technology that is popular right now. I’d mention Google Scholar, although if anyone pressed me on how one becomes an “expert at Google Scholar” I’d be fairly puzzled. I’ve never used it for much of anything but it sounds good. It has both “Google” and “Scholar” in the title. I’d make sure that I reference a bunch of sites that have Gates funding. If you’ll recall, I already solved the computer problem, I’ll just figure the Internet access one is solved as well. I’d string together a few decent resources and pretend they would somehow solve core literacy problems. I would also, when possible, forget that if I got free digital books I’d probably need them in school and most schools aren’t too fond of BYOD (despite all the press).
I’d mention two tools (Backpack3 and Diigo) which could possibly be used for some homework and call them “homework tools.”4 I’d be out of touch enough to think that homework is somehow related to researching and collaborating on the Internet with groups of people. I’d ignore the fact that many schools would consider this cheating. I’d call Evernote a study website. I’d suggest paying $5 a month for Study Rails instead of using something free.5
Is it easy to be this pompous? No it’s not. It’s hard. It takes a special kind of arrogance and hubris. Even with these tools it’s much harder to be this pompous without being an actual politician. But it’s not impossible. The ego is there. The pulpit is there. The Internet is there. The blinding hatred of others is there.
In my head, I’d pretend I knew something about schools. I’d mention a few schools I’ve heard on the news or something and then I’d condemn the whole school system. I’d come up with an elaborate path that virtually no student would do and then I’d condemn them for being lazy if they didn’t follow my advice. As a pompous white man, I’d make sure I ignored the fact that by the time a student could take charge of their learning to the extent I’m talking about they’d likely be so far behind that it’d be nearly impossible. To advocate and pursue a “good” education, you first have to know what “good” education is.
Now on to the vast bastion of whiteness- private schools. As a master of pomposity, I’d pretend that exclusive private schools offer a legitimate way out for poor black children. Every bastion of whiteness needs multicultural fund raising brochures after all. Sure it only takes three or four PBKs6 to round out a brochure but I’d focus on the advantage of being removed from your community and friends while hoping to get a scholarship for bus fare. If you’re really lucky a pompous white family will adopt you!
As a pompous white man, I’d suggest that guidance councilors at rich private schools would be experts in financial aid for minorities. After all, those guidance councilors probably practice up on that stuff with the 99% of their students who are rich white people. For a pompous white man, these kinds of things just make sense.
As a pompous white man, I’d say something cool like “get technical.” Remember when I got you that free computer and then made your Internet work? Yeah. Now I want you to learn some real specific things like “software”. Also “write code”. In pompous white man land everyone writes “code” and we certainly learned it on our own. That’s just how pompous white men roll, at least when we aren’t polishing our communication skills.
President Obama was right in his speech last week. It’s important that a pompous white man let you know this so that you don’t have to worry Obama’s speech wasn’t properly validated by real experts. As a member of the winning side, I’d make sure you knew the biggest problem isn’t inequality because that would imply I don’t deserve everything I have. Instead I’d say the problem is ignorance. If only those PBKs knew the path I’d propose for my kids if they were black. Or poor. Or black and poor. While my own kids will never do any of these things, I bet I could write a bunch of half-formed ideas and ill conceived notions down and write the time off as a donation on my taxes.
Finally, as a pompous white man, I’d let everyone know that it’s really the fault of these poor children that they aren’t doing better. They must not want help otherwise technology would help them. Or if they want help but don’t “go for it” in the ways I’ve prescribe they are dumb. Either way, it’s clearly their fault.
1 Not that pompous anyway, consider me semi-pompous.
2 Notice, I didn’t say “friends”. I don’t want to say anything that’d sound unreasonable.
3 Backpack is an easy intranet for your business. Store, share, discuss, and archive everything that’s essential for your team. Safe and secure.
4 I’ve also defined MTV as a music book.
5 Remember, I saved you all that money by sending you to Tiger Direct? Time to pay up cheapskates!
6 Poor black kids- Another tip, use acronymns when possible. Pompous white people love them.
We were looking to do something to get participants more involved in documenting the VSTE conference this year. Essentially what we decided to do was create a random assignment generator and aggregate that content to a Posterous blog.
We’ll work on our Tebowing skills but all in all it feels like it worked pretty well. Given that we only had three people 1 tag anything with #vste2011 on Flickr we had pretty good participation.
The goal was to try to keep the assignments really small and quick. We tried to mix opportunities for serious stuff in with a fair amount of fun things. I believe this was originally worked in as part of a QR code activity. I’m not sure if that hurt things. I saw multiple people struggling to get QR codes to work at a few other sessions where a tinyURL would have done a much better job.
I’d describe how I used Google to find a php script or two that would allow me to randomize some text to make the page I used but . . . if I’d be thinking more clearly I’d have just used WordPress to do this. I also tacked on a Google Form to allow for the submission of additional project ideas (WordPress comments would have been simpler). No fuss, no muss, and I still hate code.
1 John Hendron, Tim Owens, and myself
I recently tried to present something on #ds106 and MOOCs in general at VSTE. It’s probably best it wasn’t filmed. I’m going to try to present something more coherent in writing.1 This will be a description of what made this course work for me although I believe it could be generalized at least some to the world as a whole.
My description of #DS106 was essentially an online course2 meets Woodstock. You take a guided online experience and mix it with both chaos and, more importantly, community.
At the core, this is all about community. I’ll play out a few of the things that seem to indicate that to me.
Mechanical Aggregation
DS106 seems to have the semi-mythical eduglu working. People are writing in all sorts of places with a variety of clients and it’s being captured in a way that encourages both commenting, community, and creativity. The synchronous aspect of this course is important and one that is encouraged and leveraged by being able to display both content and comments in one space with very little effort on the user. It’s a really interesting world when we can both have a “room of our own” and aggregate to communal place.
It doesn’t take a room of Java developers or a million dollar a year site license for the shiniest LMS ever. Martha’s work and her description of it makes it accessible to educators without the bottomless budgets or in-house development teams. That’s important, partly because that’ll probably be everyone after the next few rounds of budget cuts, but mainly because the idea that we don’t have to wait for someone else to build what we need is an important concept. Too often, I hear people waiting for things to be given to them- be it training, PD, or some tool or another. Don’t be passive participants. You are not helpless pawns.
The Ego Boost
Audience matters. Comments matter. Jim does an impressive job of encouraging and promoting the kind of work he wants to see. In another life, I’ll go and track pre and post publishing rates for the people he mentions on his blog.3 Guliaforsythe was kind enough to find some classic Jim Groom comments and pass them my way. Bottom line, people want to know people are engaging with their work. People want an audience. That’s, in part, why the synchronicity of DS106 is important. These comments and conversations have to play out in real time for them to impact what people do. Encouraging and modeling that kind of culture is good and important to building community online.
Shared Power/Responsibility
One of the main things that made DS106 attractive to me was that I could play something other than a subservient role. I’m a bad student for normal educational models. I don’t respect people for their degrees. If the assignment seems boring or stupid, I tend not to do it and I’m not really interested in being “assessed”. I’m an adult. I want a strong role in determining what I do and how I do it. DS106 offered me that ability. The fact that any student could submit an assignment was a big deal to me. The ability then to choose from those assignments which were presented as equals with the ones that were designed by the course creators was important.
A slight throw back to the mechanics piece, but a major part of what seemed to make the projects work was the aggregation of submissions under the project itself. Much like comments on posts, seeing that people really voluntarily did your assignments and watching them stacking up was a real motivator. Those kind of feedback cycles keep people engaged and participating.
Snowballs
Once again, the community would take an initial assignment and then start iteratively redesigning it, building on the work of other students and making something new. It be interesting to see if you could guide that without forcing it. One particular example of how it played out is below.
The initial prompt was to read and respond to Gardner Campbell’s “No Digital Facelifts”.
I remixed the talk with Nas and expected that to be the end of it. Another of a series of stones thrown into the vast abyss of the Internet. the song
Yet, Grant Potter took it and remixed it again.
There’s even a Neil Young version out there someplace.
Tim Owens built a whole kinetic text movie out of the speech. I recognize Tim’s work is not a direct outgrowth of the previous work but it is indicative of people gaining momentum in terms of how they might respond to the prompt with a variety of media in ways that probably weren’t intended initially.
Stop Talking
I think a number of these concepts could be integrated into how we do online PD for teachers, how we structure courses for students in K12 and HE, and just how we conceptualize what ingredients we need to build online community.
Anyway, probably enough for now.
1 I’ll skip my pitch about how there might be some lesser revenue streams in the model that would encourage HE institutions to start doing this more. Maybe I’ll do that later just to see Jim’s reaction.
2 I know the slide says OER. I’m still thinking about why I did that other than online course was too long.
3 Martha has some DS106 stats that are interesting but they’re broader of scope.
Files
- Screenshots
- Word – Onion Skinning
- Comic Templates – Word/PPT
- PPT – Visual Timer
- Excel – MadLibs style
- Excel – Code breaker
- Excel – Self-Checking Crossword Puzzle
- Google Forms – Choose Your Own Adventure (Spreadsheet)
- Google Earth – Choose Your Own Adventure
- Excel – Easy HTML Formatting
- WordPress – Dictionary, Audio Repository, student newspaper etc.
Just a quick proof of concept for a session I’m doing at VSTE. I’m trying to show how you can use most things in all sorts of ways despite what they were intended to do. Apparently the example Google put out for this way back when actually used choose your own adventure to demo the concept. I promise I didn’t know that.
Embedded below is a simple example of a choose your own adventure story using the branch logic options in Google forms. It’s a little hard to keep the pages straight at first but it gets easier as you go. Were I doing something large, I’d probably have to map it out first.
I heard this line coming home.
How could I not make a poster for Gucci Mane and adding a whole slew of immigrant cars? I’m sure he meant he had a lot of Kias.
1 Language and themes in this song are questionable if you aren’t keeping straight gangsta.
I’ll be updating this post as I pull the content together. These are presentations I’m doing at VSTE this year.
Common Tools, Uncommon Uses
Take a sideways look at educational uses for common tools and websites. Projectile motion in Word? Google forms for a choose-your-own-adventure novel? Yep. Stuff like that.
This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list and the goal is more about encouraging people to look at these tools and realize that no matter the goal of the creators/marketers we can use them in all kinds of powerful ways that were never intended. I think in the end, I’m going to organize it by concept and show multiple applications that support those concepts.
SCREENSHOTS
- Movie frames for comics
- Capture motion data
- Summarize movies
PPT
- Visual timer
- ComicLife/Mind Mapping
- Choose Your Own Adventure
EXCEL
- Text manipulation
- Self-Correcting Crossword Puzzle
- MadLibs
- 8 bit graphic design
WORD
- Onion skinning to map motion
- DIY ComicLife, Omnigraffle etc.
GOOGLE FORMS
- Choose your own adventure
- Intelligent assessments
WORDPRESS/BLOGS
MOOCs: Define and Applied to K12
Massive Online Open Courses are catching on. What are they and what can K12 teachers learn from them? Both professional development and concrete classroom applications will be explored
After I explain what a MOOC is and show a few examples that might be interesting for K12 educators. I’m going to take what I found to be the most interesting elements from my participation in DS106 and talk about how and what I’d apply to the K12 environment both the classroom and the professional development arena.1
Stuff from DS106 that’s applicable to the classroom.
- Aggregation blog
- Student spaces
- Student created assignments
- Mixed online and f2f communities
- Multiple media outlets
- Cheerleading
Professional Development
- Leveraging existing MOOCs
- Integrating the concept into the district
- Providing for mixed experiences for teachers
- Aggregation and promotion
Also coming out of our office are-
iPads in Early Elementary
Henrico just deployed 4 iPads in every K/1st grade classroom. Why’d we do that? What Apps are we using? How are we managing devices? How are we documenting results?
Reflective Friends- Changing the Culture of Henrico County Public Schools
Ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels? Getting nowhere fast? Come learn what Henrico County did to establish an expectation for 21st century, student-centered instruction in all K-12 classrooms. After years of one step forward, two steps backwards, we have implemented a reflective friends process that consists of a series of classroom observations by “outside consultants” (in-house and outside our county) using our Teaching Innovation Progression Rubric (TIPC). Data is collected on 21st century instruction comparing select teachers versus random teachers, students and teachers are interviewed, and all data is triangulated to paint a baseline picture of a school’s 21st century instruction. Additional observations are performed at the end of the year to measure growth. Administrators from all schools have been an integral part of this process and learned how to use TIPC to further develop their own observational skills surrounding 21st century instruction. We are beginning our 3rd iteration of observations this year will bring all 46 elementary schools into the process this fall. We are also beginning to help school teams develop their own observational teams by bringing department and instructional leaders into the process. Reflective Friends, along with Henrico 21, is setting expectations and accountability for 21st century instruction in HCPS.
Henrico 21- Part 2- One year- 238 lessons later…
Teachers are ready, willing, and able to implement 21st century instruction in their classrooms but their cry is always “Help! Show me what it looks like!” Henrico 21 does just that. We have currently posted over 230 lessons that teachers can use as models for 21st century lessons at various levels of implementation. Participants will learn how we use the power of WordPress to format and post lessons and take advantage of the social networking aspects of WordPress. We are using this constantly evolving site to change the culture in our schools and develop community surrounding 21st century learning. Participants will learn how we use our Teaching Innovation Progression chart (our 21st century rubric) as the foundation for high quality lesson development. Henrico 21, along with Reflective Friends, is helping us begin to experience real change in instruction which is evidenced by the growth in the site from 8- to 238 lessons in less than a year.
Digital Curriculum
Changing Instructional Practices
Henrico County Public Schools is currently in a two–year process of replacing textbooks with digital curriculum. By 2013, we will create curriculum for 40 secondary content areas. The content will serve multiple purposes including face-to-face, blended, and eventually online courses. This process will involve multiple stakeholders including educational specialists, classroom teachers, instructional technology resource teachers, and the department of instructional technology. The work we are doing centers around the TPCK model with heavy emphasis on 21st century learning experiences that align with our Teaching Innovation Progression chart (TIPC). Courses are being developed using the Backwards Design framework and will include 21st century performance-based assessments. As part of this project, we are working to develop a container for curriculum and content that will be transparent and open to anyone. This is a work in progress. We will share our journey as well as any materials we have developed with all participants. We look forward to sharing and collaborating with others who are working to meet the same goals.
1 I have some more expansive ideas on how higher ed could leverage this concept to provide semi-facilitated PD for school systems but I won’t torture anyone with that right now.
Rocks are going to REVOLUTIONIZE education! Just look how easily rocks cover all levels of Bloom’s!
Remembering
I write things on my rocks and it helps me remember. I can also use rocks as eco-friendly flash cards.
Understanding
Comparing my rock to other rocks demonstrates my understanding. Sometime I categorize all of my rocks.
Applying
I apply what I know about physics and use my kinesthetic intelligence to skip my rock.
Analyzing
I like to use conglomerates to help me differentiate between components and analyze the role of different composite pieces.
Evaluating
Sometimes I just sit on a large rock, quietly reflecting on my rock- thinking about how we are all on a large rock and stuff like that.
Creating
My rock can be used to make many things. I use it as a hammer mostly but I can stack my rocks into cool towers, use it as a canvas, make it into an arrowhead, or use to ground grain.
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