HeadspaceJ: Instructional Design and Technology Blog

Site Move

I've finally moved this site over to Blogspot like my other blogs. I've just been too lazy to turf my old Tripod account. New address: http://headspacej.blogspot.com and Atom feed: http://headspacej.blogspot.com/atom.xml

SimCity Learning

A great account of the challenges and opportunities in using SimCity with middle school students. Wonderful stuff...

Site Move

This site has moved to http://headspacej.blogspot.com/.

The Next Learning Landscape

Congratulations to David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller on the launch of a new release of their Elgg web app. They've polished and simplified the interface across the board and added new administrative functions (among other enhancements).

The potential for this learning landscape stuff is great -- I could see community groups, homeschool associations, wine clubs, schools, distributed project teams, and research groups (etc, etc) of all kinds getting huge value out of this combination of social software, file storage/sharing, and flexible permissions. It'll be exciting to see how it develops in the next year or two.

Enraged?

�Engage Me or Enrage Me�: What Today�s Learners Demand:

"And what they are being served is, for the most part, stale, bland, and almost entirely stuff from the past. Yesterday�s education for tomorrow�s kids. Where is the programming, the genomics, the bioethics, the nanotech�the stuff of their time? It�s not there. Not even once a week on Fridays.

That�s one more reason the kids are so enraged�they know their stuff is missing!"

Teaching Happiness?

What Does It Mean to Educate the Whole Child?:

"Recently, I have suggested another aim: happiness (Noddings, 2003). Great thinkers have associated happiness with such qualities as a rich intellectual life, rewarding human relationships, love of home and place, sound character, good parenting, spirituality, and a job that one loves. We incorporate this aim into education not only by helping our students understand the components of happiness but also by making classrooms genuinely happy places.

Few of these aims can be pursued directly, the way we attack behavioral objectives. Indeed, I dread the day when I will enter a classroom and find Happiness posted as an instructional objective. Although I may be able to state exactly what students should be able to do when it comes to adding fractions, I cannot make such specific statements about happiness, worthy home membership, use of leisure, or ethical character. These great aims are meant to guide our instructional decisions. They are meant to broaden our thinking�to remind us to ask why we have chosen certain curriculums, pedagogical methods, classroom arrangements, and learning objectives. They remind us, too, that students are whole persons�not mere collections of attributes, some to be addressed in one place and others to be addressed elsewhere."

Via Stephen

Bloggerific

Blogger has been long considered the "beginner" blogging platform, but they keep quietly adding features that put it in a different league. First it was a commenting system that works great, then they allowed photo uploads, and this morning I just noticed a little icon button that lets me upload files as well.

Personal Learning Environment

Scott Wilson is already to the UI prototype stage for a very well thought out social-software application. I love this -- so much of the stuff we talk about is just that, talk, but he's going a step further. It made me think that the ELGG platform already has much of this functionality, and could perhaps be modified with some template/interface work. It's also a bit reminiscent of Marc Canter's interface for the digital lifestyle aggregator.

Ed.Tech and Desire

Schools, Web 2.0, and the specter of desire is a nice mind-bender of a post. I'll quote too much of it, because I think these two paragraphs really show the contrast between old views of educational technology and the emerging view:

"It's not about storing and delivering documents, obtaining and protecting content, reproducing the class and department structures, restoring the Ozymandian authority of the pedagogue, driving students back to books, adding a human dimension to the chilly mechanical, regaining their attention, or fighting for brand and relevance. Pederson's rumination casts us back to some of the desires which knitted learners and teachers together in the first place, and still draw us into the same space. Listen to the fluidity of that swarm of desires, and think about how the Web 2.0 platform easily enables them to embody and proliferate.

Such desires are productive, constructive. We don't enter the classroom and await for Freire-free content to pour into our heads; instead we post, comment, search, and agglutinate into clusters aimed at getting knowledge. We publish our thoughts and findings in venues more finely grained, rapidly responsive, and far more broadly accessible than the scholarly paper or presentation, from wikis in process to sequences of archived blog entries. The open, social nature of the new Web means this experience is shareable, and hence replicable, and also driven by desire - I can point to a multiblog, multicampus discussion, then add to it in another entry, garnering feedback from still other audiences., a thing not at all possible with face-to-face classrooms or BlackBoard."

Via Stephen.

Prof Ratings

Stephen linked to this research on ratemyprofessors.com this week. I can see why profs don't much like sites that let students vent about them but it sure is an interesting use of the web, and you start to filter out the venting comments. I checked out the prof ratings in the education faculty at Memorial, where I've been taking online courses in the last couple of years, and found that the ratings were pretty much spot-on for the instructors I've had (and the reputations of the ones I haven't).

Does College Matter?

Last month, Kathy asked Does College Matter?, then answered her question a bit later: College Matters...Sometimes. Both posts are excellent, with loads of solid comments to keep the conversation going. I liked her take on some alternative options:

"Maybe there should be third-party 'learning designers' who you pay to plan and choose the best options and put together a perfectly tailored custom program from a variety of learning vendors (instead of throwing all your learning eggs into one school basket) that still includes some general education, but in the way that makes the most sense for that particular student, and uses both online, distance, and *some* face-to-face learning. If a parent (and more importantly, the student) thinks that leaving home is important, that can be a component as well (although I'm still voting for the crash-course with a backpack and a rail pass thing). The students could go to a kind of "advanced learning camp" that could be anything from an off-campus dorm (complete with cafeteria), or something more primitive."

Rob wrote a related bit about the financial implications and expectations surrounding the college dream. He and Cyn also questioned how well the education system is preparing kids for a changing world. Lots of good big-picture ideas floating around.

Elgg Radio

The Elgg team launched Elgg Radio with their first podcast, an excellent interview with George Siemens (12MB mp3). It sounds like they're also planning a good lineup of future guests.

I'm still not the hugest fan of audioblogging as a way to transmit and glean information, but there is something nice and personal about hearing people speak in their "real" voices. George is one smart cookie, and Dave keeps him loaded up with solid questions. You get the impression that they could have easily turned half and hour into six hours of discussing these topics.

Extracurriculars as the Curriculum

This paper is about six years old already, but provides an interesting vision for change in the education system. I probably wouldn't focus so much on online courses as being the solution to all problems, and the writing does have the ring of the high-tech bubble of that time, but this stuff mostly seems attainable and desirable to me.

Extracurriculars as the Curriculum: A Vision of Education for the 21st Century -- synopsis and full paper (pdf). There are also a number of other papers from the same project that mostly look solid and haven't appeared to have aged badly. A quote from the synopsis:

"The education system in our country, based for too long on the pedagogically invalid 'factory model,' is in dire need of an overhaul. Thankfully, technology is on the verge of fundamentally reshaping the American education system. In particular, the technology to deliver full-length courses is rapidly becoming a reality, and the impact will be pervasive. The early signs of this change are already visible. I see technology driving educational change in the following key areas:
New role for teachers
New role for schools
Centralization of curriculum and instructional development"

Aaron's Questions

< href="http://www.eastasiacenter.net/apcampbell/2005/05/03#a394">Stitching Toward Integration
Aaron had this great post months ago -- this shows how far behind I am on posting things I've saved in Bloglines. Some of his excellent big-picture thinking about education (again), that is certainly related to my earlier rambling about quality of life:

"How many students out there feel as if they are in imprisoned? Would an educational institution encourage the pursuit of a particular activity if it led to integration, fulfillment, and a sense of freedom? Where is the space for such pursuits in educational institutions? Why do we shut people out of these experiences through rigid curricula and imposed educational goals? Who creates standardized learning criteria and why do we place such a premium on their achievement at the expense of happiness, wholeness, freedom, personal growth, and creative and emotional expression? What kind of society are our institutions contributing toward?"

Education and Quality of Life

I found a goldmine today in the reports from the Quality of Life Research Center, headed up by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I've been exploring ideas related to quality of life for my thesis, and occasionally I've been astounded how little K-12 education does to address this concept, both in the curriculum (why are kids not learning about choices and ways of living that are likely to lead to better quality of life, or at least exploring differences in quality of life in other cultures?) and in a lack of attention to ensuring a high quality of life for students (through autonomy, challenge, nurturing, etc.) throughout their school years. This research center tackles some of these questions:

Student Engagement in High School Classrooms from the Perspective of Flow Theory

"However, students do not experience alienation and disconnection during all encounters with learning. Certain conditions may promote excitement, stimulation, and engagement in the learning process. In this article, we focus on student engagement within the framework of flow theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). This study focuses on how students spend their time in high school classrooms, and the conditions under which they become more engaged in learning."

Happiness in Everyday Life: The Uses of Experience Sampling

"Happiness will increase to the extent that individuals are provided with the means to learn skills that can be deployed to meet reasonable challenges; that they are given freedom to express themselves within bounds of responsibility; that they are allowed to experience the joy of interaction with peers of one�s choice and with adults that care for their well-being. These requirements for happiness presumably operate at every level of societal complexity, from the macro-level of the economy and political structure to the meso- and micro-levels of community, school, and family. There are clear trends in contemporary life that militate against such conditions. It is difficult for a young person to be happy when living in a sterile suburb that lacks opportunities for action, forced to attend schools where there is little chance to express oneself except in abstract intellectual terms, surrounded by a small nuclear family that is seldom together and relaxed enough to interact freely."

Thesis Update

A few readers and colleagues have expressed interest in my thesis project, so you all get a quick update.

Last summer I started a blogging project to collect ideas about the conflict between our values and our lifestyle choices, how decisions in one area of our lives affect other areas, and specifically how young people learn about and envision their future options. I borrowed the term lifestylism as the title of the project, as a way of unifying those concepts.

So now I've got a year's worth of research, reading and writing represented in the blog and I officially start working on the thesis in September. I still need an advisor, and I'm hoping to finish early next year. I've narrowed my topic a lot since my initial pondering and a bit more since my recent focusing efforts.

I plan to explore the aspirations of teenagers (educational, career, relionships, family, lifestyle) in education and outside of school, figure out how successful they've been in achieving those goals in the past decade or two, then create a proposal outlining how to use the web to help teens build engaging, holistic (lifestyle-oriented, rather than just career/college planning) reprentations of possible futures as a way to get them on the path to achieving their goals (or at least taking steps to pursue interesting things that will land them somewhere they didn't expect).