In most English classes the teacher chooses all of the content in addition to all of the assignments. In some classes you’ll get to choose between a few books, assignments, or essay topics that the teacher has provided. The projects tend to tier upward in terms of sophistication and/or length.¹ There is essentially one broad common experience for everyone and virtually every structural element originates with the teacher. The student ability to alter the class is limited to asking questions. That leads to a fairly predictable experience built to produce similar products which are easier to compare to one another.

English, in particular, seems to beg for a different paradigm for course participation/creation. I talked some about the mechanism for infusing student selected media into a course in the previous post, so I’m doing this backwards to some degree. The lower portion of the image above is a rough conceptualization of what the course itself might come to look like as compared to a traditional course (the upper portion of the image).

A chunk of this is colored by how I’ve seen elements of #ds106 play out. I have always loved the idea that participants can submit project ideas. Linking those ideas to the student work created based on them makes it far more powerful and interesting for everyone. It also substantially changes the locus of control for the course. Cory Doctrow recently had something similar happening in an English class using his novel Little Brother as basis for songs, fan fiction extension chapters, and alternate chapter extensions. Doctrow goes out of his way to make this possible with his CC licensing and general enthusiasm for fans interacting with his work.

Will you have to think through quality control? Sure but it’s worth considering how you can integrate that into the course by infusing an understanding of standards based grading and guiding the alignment of projects to that concept. I’d look at quality control here as a problem I’d want to have as it opens a number conversations that should be valuable and should further the goals of the class.

The other portion of DS106 that I found particularly interesting was the progressive extension and remixing of participant created projects. The idea that other students would look at something you did and find it inspiring enough to make them take action (create a similar work, remix it, create something new). An example of that chain that mattered to me in ds106 was when I watched No More Digital Facelifts. I believe the assignment was to reflect on the talk in a blog post. I was interested enough in the language and poetic elements of Gardner’s talk that I opted remix it over Nas’s If I Ruled the World. You can see all kinds of responses to that post. That was empowering to me in a variety of ways and it made me reconsider exactly what role I might play in this course and how my actions might create ripples or waves greater in size than the originating force. There is an audience and what I do can have power.

Clearly, none of this is rocket science and none of it is a promise of instant engagement and success. In many ways it creates different problems than the traditional class but the problems are more interesting to me. Breaking students out of the consumption mindset will be a fairly difficult task by itself.

In the end, I see little choice in our current landscape. Either teachers start actively harnessing and successfully promoting the interesting human elements of differentiation and relationships or they’ll be replaced by the mechanical versions. I know “A computer never hugged anyone.” but a human shaped pillow could and a low-paid child supervisor endorsed in hugs probably already is. Teachers seem to be making the wrong arguments and thinking of the past as a far more solid foundation for the future than it seems to be, especially given the PR arrayed against the institution.

I’m not talking about paprika flavored mush and I’m not talking about a magic fairyland where you chug cherry flavored corn syrup to your heart’s content with no ill effects. My focus is on thinking about how this might work for a teacher with fairly traditional-ized students in a district where success is still defined mainly through standardized tests.² I am going to make the assumption that these students have a computer and access to the Internet.

It’s also evident my thoughts aren’t revolutionary but I think the ability for technology to help make this kind of personalization much more manageable for teachers and students (in a semi-traditional school framework) is a relatively new development. Classroom workflows don’t come up much, if at all, in my wanderings but I think they are important and should be considered. There’s also quite a lot of current hype and focus on flipping/blending/frappéing³ Maybe it has to do with districts finally giving up on providing technology and allowing BYOD. My bet is the BYOD wave will go poorly at scale and will result in fairly trivial surface level “changes” – some googling of answers, clicker assessments, and the ability to check grades/hw on line but nothing that really matters at any kind of scale. For the record, that’s a pragmatic view rather than a pessimistic one. It takes a huge amount of work to change how school functions, to actually take advantage of what could be done with technology. Long term pedagogical conditioning and the very way the mechanical pieces of school work are against you. I say that speaking from a place of privilege where we’ve had 1:1 laptops since 2001. I’m spoiled but I’ve also had a long time to observe/participate in digital content, blended learning, personalization, etc. up close and watch how many different scenarios have played out in many different classrooms and schools. I

Common and Individualized

Most of the time it comes down to balance. That’s pretty much a thematic element for me in everything- lots and lots of gray.

I think there’s a need to balance shared media experiences⁴ with individual media experiences while still making the connections between the two. It’s difficult, but essential in my opinion, to create a pattern of shared experiences that becomes the substrate for individual and small group experiences and that you intentionally build on these common experiences. The whole notion of a cohort of peers engaging in synchronous or semi-synchronous acts has value. There are ways to preserve this kind of peer interaction and the value of larger discussions while still allowing students to follow individual paths but it has to be done with intent.

Common experiences give the class similar references, vocabulary, and offer the teacher a chance to model specific elements of analysis or other skills. The individual paths offer the chance to make new connections to items of individual interest, to broaden and deepen understandings, and to practice applying skills in new realms. These individual experiences can also help pull other students onto interesting path ways.

Most classes are composed entirely of teacher selected common media experiences. On occasion, “current events” are brought in by students or they get to pick a book from one or two options. Part of this switch is about allowing for broader and more sophisticated student choice but another portion is about taking some of these individual choices and elevating them to a whole class experience. The teacher can act like a writer selectively using allusions to small group or individual experiences to encourage other students towards useful information or to allow those students to take an elevated role in the class. That takes at least two things. The student has to be reflecting and curating in a way that the teacher can see and the teacher has to be tracking that content in a way that enables them to weave the students and content into the common events. This isn’t putting the entire onus for elevating the content and making these connections on the teacher but it’d be especially important as students were getting used to this new set up. There would be interesting elements of community building (online and off) that would need to be considered in addition to the pedagogy and mechanics necessary to make it flow.

Open Eyes and Workflows

It seems increasingly important to me that students (and teachers) look at their non-school world using the lenses of analysis and patterns of thought traditionally constrained to the classroom and to content defined as “educational.” If we believe that it is these patterns of thought and analysis that make liberal arts/mathematical/scientific thinking valuable then we have to do a much better job getting people to think like this in the wild.

One relatively low bar to getting this started in an English classroom is getting students to set up consumption⁵ workflows around content that students are interested in and then setting up an framework/workflow for curation in addition to a framework for aggregation and possible asynchronous communication around the curated results.

Initially you’d create one easy place for students to get a bunch of different web based content. In fancier terms, I might say- “Create an aggregation point for media consumption.” In the past, I’d have used Google Reader. I can do that in Fever but you’re likely to want to use something free like Feedly. The key is adding a layer of curation/annotation between the student reader and the class aggregation. That metadata layer could be built into your RSS reader (Google Reader would let me add tag and notes that would be added to that content in an RSS feed) or you could add a step/system and add the annotation via a social bookmarking service like Diigo. What I’d like to get is a cycle like the one depicted below. Using one the “Press This” bookmarklets for WordPress is also an attractive option and gives more features (image embedding, tiered categories etc.).

I made a quick example of what a nascent site like this might look like for English. I have added some content to it but hope to open it up to a few English classes once the year starts, assuming I find some willing teachers.

My goal would be to create interwoven clusters of content that were mixtures of teacher chosen elements and student found media. Students would be applying the understandings from class and bringing in media that made sense. In a perfect world, we’d be creating a mini This American Life or Moth Story hour that blended elements under a central theme. At times that theme might be large, like “What is truth?” but it could be smaller and more defined with students aggregating diverse examples of poetic language, allusions, quotes that moved them etc. Some of this work could happen semi-synchronously other elements would add up over time and would be asynchronous (more like a snowball). You could take different aspects of this pretty far afield with groups or individuals and still loop back using the common language and grounding of the teacher chosen elements. It would be important to actually make use of the content and to work it into individual and group conversations in ways that mattered. It would also provide interesting fodder for student assignments. It’d be far more compelling to create or analyze from the repository of quotes generated by your peers than to use the homogenized quotes from your literature textbook.

1400 words is probably a good place to stop for now. If you’ve made it this far you’re proving people will read long form content even on the Internet.

I’m totally unhappy with this graph. Totally. I messed with some color pallets etc. but it just didn’t do what I wanted at all.

I then went to the opposite end of the spectrum and wanted to see what sparklines might show me. Sparklines are a favorite of Edward Tufte who is on the super minimalist side of the data visualization spectrum.¹ At first I didn’t think there was enough data to make the sparklines work. I then tried compressing the horizontal axis and it improved things but it’s still not what I want.

Here’s another stacked year graph that I might work on some more. I ended up wandering into Adobe Illustrator and found out there are some interesting tricks for making graphs in there. I will explore it more in the near future. I’m learning a lot of things.

Here’s a messy (deliberately) stack of the graphs above with the opacity set to 20% or so. It gives a modified version of a stacked bar chart that I kind of like. It’s not a complete picture but, coupled with the source graphs, it starting to look like what I want.

You can see the Google example for this kind of graphic here. This is my first time messing with it so I started by copying their example into my text editor. Their example was pretty close to what I wanted in terms of the structure of the information. They had Location, Parent, Volume, Color as the main variables. I wanted something pretty similar.

Instead of ‘Global,’ ‘HCPS’ was my top category with the schools taking the place of the countries. Pretty simple but I sure didn’t want to write all that data by hand. I already had the basic data in Excel, I just had to come up with the right formula. In this case -

=”['"&C2&"',"&"'"&A2&"'"&","&D2&","&E2&"],”

It’s worth remembering how handy Excel is at doing stuff like this. Anything within double quotes is written as is and the rest is just plugging in the cell variables. From there I just needed to cut and paste the column in. Easy and quick.

The only other small I change I made was to the color scale. It was red/green which tends to indicate pretty specific types of judgement. I wasn’t interested in that so I made a small switch there. Changing the minColor/maxColor variables indicated below. They are hexadecimal color values if you’re unfamiliar with them.

minColor: ‘#0033CC‘,
midColor: ‘#ddd’,
maxColor: ‘#fff‘,
headerHeight: 15,
fontColor: ‘black’,
showScale: true});

I’m still not sure about a couple of things. For instance, I can’t figure out why Glen Allen is darker than Tucker and Godwin on the main view. That seems to be similar to what’s going on the example but I’m not sure why. It’d also be nice if clicking on the parent piece after you drill down would take you back up a level. I think that’s doable.

You can see the full size example here if it amuses you. It’s crammed in below using an iframe which will let you put just about anything into an html page. The code used to embed it below is provided as an example.
<iframe src="http://bionicteaching.com/visuals/google_api.html" width="650" height="500"></iframe>

I haven’t made up my mind about this podcast as a whole yet but this one was interesting. The whole idea of virtual law for video games is interesting but it’s further improved by the idea that a lot of this based purely on words.

Online, multi-player games create addictive, all-encompassing competitive worlds for players. But sometimes, players disturb the fantasy with abusive behavior. Through trial and error, game developers have found that “virtual judiciaries” can help solve problems in their virtual worlds, and the results have real-world consequences.

This episode has a number of different interesting options but a huge part of the issue is around defining solitary confinement, torture, and cruel and unusual punishment.

In its code of ethics, the American Institute of Architects requires members to “uphold human rights.” But what does that mean when it comes to prisons—specificially, those that confine inmates largely to their cells with little to do?

Dear judges: Stop trying to figure out what the founders meant by every little word. You can’t, and it doesn’t matter.

To get at the original understanding of the text, the court started with the language, which normally trumps other evidence about the founders’ intentions. The court first argued that the language refers to the recess, not a recess. Thus, the founders could have had only one particular recess in mind, and that recess must be the one that takes place between the two sessions. Because Congress chose not to leave a gap between the 2011 session and the 2012 session, the recess could not have taken place.
Two of three judges sitting on the panel further argued that by providing for recess appointments only to vacancies “that may happen during the Recess,” the founders intended to limit appointments to vacancies that open up during the intersession recess. But the vacancies that Obama filled could not have opened up during an intersession recess because no such recess took place.
Both of these readings are possible; they may even be plausible. The administration’s argument—that the recess means any recess, and that the vacancies that happen during the recess are vacancies that exist during the recess—is also consistent with the language. But it’s strange to think that “the Recess” means only one (intersession) recess when, even under the court’s interpretation, there have been hundreds of intersession recesses—every year there was another intersession recess up until last year—and the founders surely expected numerous such recesses unless they believed that the republic would collapse in 1791. Indeed, the Constitution repeatedly refers to “the Congress” and “the President.” If the court’s interpretation of “the” as “the single” were correct, this would mean that the founders expected only one Congress and one president to ever come into existence, when in fact (as other language makes clear) they contemplated numerous Congresses (one every two years) and numerous presidents as well.
But here’s the point. It defies belief that the founders intended to constrain recess appointments by using the word the rather than a, or by using the word happen rather than exist. If the founders had feared that the president would abuse the recess appointments power in order to create a tyranny, they would have made their intentions to constrain the president a bit more explicit.

From Slate

From this older post about word choice and gender in ads for boys and girls toys. It’d make for an interesting project for other media as well.

]]> http://bionicteaching.com/?feed=rss2&p=2676 0 http://bionicteaching.com/?p=2674 http://bionicteaching.com/?p=2674#comments Sun, 09 Jun 2013 00:44:45 +0000 Tom Woodward http://bionicteaching.com/?p=2674 The following is something I’m experimenting with. I’ve been pretty interested in workflows lately and I’m trying to get a little more out of bookmarking. The ability to create a summary post at preset time intervals based on a particular tag is something Diigo offers. I’m hoping that taking advantages of some of these bells and whistles will help me come to like Diigo.

After using Diigo for a few months, I still don’t like it. For instance, their bookmarklet loads, then pauses and adds something that makes me hit the wrong button about 30% of the time. I’m also not a fan of the way they embed ads. I miss Delicious Classic like people missed Coke after the debacle that was New Coke. After the Yahoo abandonment I hung on because I’d always preferred the simplicity. Eventually, the poor performance of the remixed Delicious literally forced me to leave. Way too often bookmarking a page resulted in having to hit refresh before I could interact with it again. That’s impressively dysfunctional. The subsequent loss of link rolls and other basic functionality eventually resulted in my move to Diigo.

My current setup is supposed to mirror Diigo to Delicious which then feeds my Pinboard account. So if Delicious ever stops actively breaking things, I’m prepared to return. It may be that Pinboard is the path but I haven’t messed with it enough.

• The Stany Face

  Lift up your e’en to yon cauld face
  And lat your hert grow still:
  Auld is the world, but young the days
  O’ kindness and guid-will.

  -the readings of many of the poems are available in audio format and are worth listening to

  tags: poetry english scottish audio weekly post

• McDonald’s Theory — What I Learned Building… — Medium

  I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s.

  An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!

  It’s as if we’ve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonald’s Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones.

  tags: theory McDonald’s idea creativity post itrt

Posted from Diigo. Other links are here.

]]> http://bionicteaching.com/?feed=rss2&p=2674 2 http://bionicteaching.com/?p=2665 http://bionicteaching.com/?p=2665#comments Sat, 08 Jun 2013 03:15:34 +0000 Tom Woodward http://bionicteaching.com/?p=2665 We have 668 high school teachers using at least .1 MB on a shared network volumes we’ve collectively dubbed “Virtual Share.”

Those 668 high school teachers use 2019.7 GB or 2.02 terabytes of storage. What’s particularly interesting to me is the disproportionate usage between teachers.

The top user, a single person, uses 180 GB or roughly 17% of the total.¹

The top 10 users use 733.2 GB of storage.

The top 20 users use 993.6 GB of storage or almost 50% of the storage is used by roughly 3% of the users.²

These are just embeds of the data from Google Spreadsheets. Nothing fancy, not much control but I think it does paint a decent picture of the extreme differences in resource usage. I do continue to have trouble with the interactive chart embeds outside of the spreadsheet. I do like the unintentional psychedelic effect on the pie chart.

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¹ No judgements on quality of use, just amazement that they are so far out there.

² Makes me reconsider the whole 1% thing as even more screwed up.

]]> http://bionicteaching.com/?feed=rss2&p=2665 6 http://bionicteaching.com/?p=2653 http://bionicteaching.com/?p=2653#comments Sat, 08 Jun 2013 01:59:37 +0000 Tom Woodward http://bionicteaching.com/?p=2653 I spent quite a lot of time with my wife and oldest son looking at the dialectic survey map¹ and trying to figure out which one of us said a particular phrase or pronounced a word a certain way. About half the time I answered “all of the above” while my wife was tried and true Massachusetts for just about every one.²

I figure my wandering ways are to blame so I figured I’d take a shot at visualizing that. I did recall that Google Spreadsheets would let you visualize spreadsheet data on map with no trouble at all. It’s an option under “insert chart.” All I needed was a location in the first column and the numerical value for the circle in the second column (years in this case). Said and done.³ Too easy. Mine is immediately below and is followed by my wife’s map. Turns out it has a rough time with two different data sources from one document- even if they’re on different sheets. I could have made an additional spreadsheet but I don’t like this enough. Easy-ish but not much control. I’m going to look for some other options.

Image Version

Turns out I’m starting to hate these as there are more issues than they’re worth. I don’t know how to allow access to the interactive version as I’ve published everything I can.

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¹ It was a good time and I’ll not apologize for it.

² For the record, Massachusetts says just about everything wrong. It’s really sad.

³ Well, not quite. Turns out you can only have two columns of data or the whole thing errors out even if you only had two columns chosen for the chart (which works within the spreadsheet but not on the embed).

]]> http://bionicteaching.com/?feed=rss2&p=2653 2 http://bionicteaching.com/?p=2649 http://bionicteaching.com/?p=2649#comments Thu, 06 Jun 2013 19:05:17 +0000 Tom Woodward http://bionicteaching.com/?p=2649 Word Games/English in the Wild

I made a blog focused on the idea of English in the wild. The goal is to look at language and how it works outside of school, to capture the things people find interesting, odd, or broken about English as they interact with it. Essentially, I keep finding things that are interesting (at least to me)- strange phrases, interesting sentences, games comedians play with words¹, even a little Scottish poetry recently.² I thought it might be useful to aggregate content like this. Naturally, it’s just me at this point but I’ll invite/beg some people to join me at some point and hopefully it’ll map out to students as well. This content can then become fodder for all kinds of reuse.

I see aspects of it falling short of the weight of Defective Yeti’s book review posts but containing elements of them. His structure would make a grate template for larger scale project and I like his “Words I Looked Up” at the bottom of the post and his neologisms (and I had to look neologism up). So between neologisms and paraprosdokian you have some unfortunate names but interesting items.

This idea may be something that was submitted Henrico 21 at one point. Gaynell remembers it but hasn’t provided me with proof yet. I went through a huge chunk of our H21 lessons tagged English and found many interesting things but couldn’t find this.

Quantified Self

I need to be more intentional about tracking things about myself and trying to be intentional. I’m going to do something about this as part of the data visualization thing we’re doing (a major part of this thing for me is constructing a sustainable workflow for the process).

This could play a really interesting role in the idea of student efficacy and metacognition in a way we don’t even come close to currently (workflow would be key, as would at least some degree of interest but digital environments might make harvesting data interesting- especially interconnected activities like twitter/social bookmarking etc.). You should watch this video if that kind of thing appeals to you at all.

The video is from quantifiedself.com and Amy Robinson is a very interesting person in general.

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¹ I don’t have satellite radio but VA Beach has an AM comedy station (Funny 850) I can pick up most of the time and it inspired the Sklar brothers post the other day and has me watching Netflix standup as well.

² Na Day Sae Dark – make sure you play the audio

]]> http://bionicteaching.com/?feed=rss2&p=2649 0 http://bionicteaching.com/?p=2647 http://bionicteaching.com/?p=2647#comments Thu, 06 Jun 2013 02:24:31 +0000 Tom Woodward http://bionicteaching.com/?p=2647 TL;DR

Greetings good people.

We, some HCPS ITRTs and hopefully some other people, are participating in a MOOC-ish type of thing guided semi-synchronous online learning experience and we’d like you to play along if you’re interested and excited. The experience slanted towards people who care about the spaces where technology, culture and learning become blurry. Sign up over here and the first “assignment” is here.

Masochist Version

Massive Online Open Courses are currently being heralded as the future of education and there are lots of them out there.  It is fairly typical edtech hyperbole to hail the newest thing as the solution to all of our educational ills but there is a lot of value in having educational experiences with mixed enrollment that live in the open web and take advantage of that ecosystem of learning and communication.  That value is particularly evident for people who are focused on exploring and shaping how technology impacts learning.  If you aren’t personally leveraging technology to reach new understandings, to see things in new ways, to make connections, to energize yourself, to build communities, to educate yourself- it’s going to be impossible to speak with authenticity, nuance and authority on the subject to teachers and students.

So in order to put my time and energy where my mouth is, I’m going to work with interested parties here in HCPS to facilitate a Communal Open Educational Opportunity (COO?). To help frame it, I’ll break it down against the current MOOC model.

MASSIVE vs Communal

It won’t be massive but this will be open to anyone who wants to play along. The goal is for it to be big enough. It will be focused on building connections between participants and making connections to other communities. Massive tends to result in choices made to address scale. I hope this is less hot dog factory and more artisanal sausage making.

OPEN/ONLINE

It is online and in the open. I hope to see external participants and I believe the content produced will be useful to others. It will attempt to take advantage of the way information works online in addition to

COURSE vs Experience

I don’t know if this a course in the way it’s typically defined. My goal is to make it more of a guided experience through a series of broadly defined categories with lots of opportunity for engineered serendipity, flexibility, community guidance/participation in how things are shaped etc. Essentially, enough top down guidance to provide some shared experiences to build on but with the explicit, expressed and deliberately engineered freedom to encourage participants to build off core elements in ways that matter to them. I want this to be an opportunity to practice what we preach and to enjoy the process.

Caveats

Come and play if you want to. It will be messy and it will be done in a way that amuses me. Don’t participate out of any sense of obligation.

Participate in all, some or none without resorted self-recrimination. Apologies for complete/incomplete work are not needed. This is a guilt-free process.

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