Gary Stager at PDS

Gary Stager with PDS faculty March 30th

Here’s a story that Gary related at Vassar on Thursday. It’s about his seven year old nephew and a truly ridiculous reading assignment. Schlock and Awe

Everything’s Cool

It was a great day in the James Earl Jones theater at PDS yesterday. Dan Gold – a member of the PDS class of 1978 – was there for the first public screening in the Hudson valley of the film he co-directed: Everything’s Cool – a hot documentary about global warming.

This is a film that informs and entertains. It tells “the incredible story of a handful of global warming messengers speaking out in a time of disinformation”. Essentially it is about the gap between the what scientists believe about global warming and what the general public believes. It’s about how that gap was created and about how it is currently beginning to close. It weaves personal stories with public action and manages to be very funny at the same time. It also gives reason for optimism.

The high school students who saw the film in the afternoon gave it high marks indeed. They also enjoyed the opportunity to hear from Dan about his work as well as about his time at PDS. One of the stories he told was of his Central Studies elective in his senior year. Seems that his plan was to hang out with a friend playing music in his parents’ basement. After that proposal was rejected, he was encouraged to take on a multi- media project. It turned out so well that the school ended up by buying it from him to show to prospective families.

Everything’s Cool premiered at the Sundance festival in January. If you missed your chance to see the film yesterday look for it when it gets distribution or buy the DVD. Meanwhile you can find out more and watch some video clips at Everything’s Cool.

Two children in Mishmaref wonder how to move a village.

Snow groomer Bish Neuhauser making biodiesel in his garage.

Earth

Earth…a poem by the the children in the Pre- K. These are their words – the places they know, the animals they know and their request to us. Their words and pictures became a book that they made together. It is now back in their classroom. Outstanding.

The Machine Stops

In an earlier post I mentioned the prescient Marshall McCluhan who saw decades ago that we were living in an era of connectivity and communications

In that interview he commented that most of us think in the past. For artists, he says, it is different. They live in the present, they think in the present, and it can be terrifying.

Here (again) is E. M. Forster.

“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”
“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn’t say anything against the Machine.”

“Why not?”
“One mustn’t.” *

Deep below the surface of the earth humans live served by the all powerful machine that meets every need of the body and the mind. In her solitary cell Vashti studies The Book of the Machine. It contains instructions for every possible contingency. Humans created it. Now they rely on it completely. Vashti has begun to secretly worship the Machine. Her son Kuno, however, is beginning to rebel. He has even fought his way to the surface of the earth and discovered that there is another way of life. He tries to impress on his mother the beauty of the earth and the sky but she shrinks away horrified and disgusted. Vashti must do the distasteful thing – she must tear herself away from her “ideas” and her underground cell from where she lectures on the music of the Brisbane School during the Australian Period. She must travel across the world in an airship to see her son, in person.

She flies over the Himalayas:

‘Those mountains to the right – let me show you them.’ She pushed back a metal blind. The main chain of the Himalayas was revealed. ‘They were once called the Roof of the World, those mountains.’

‘You must remember that, before the dawn of civilization, they seemed to be an impenetrable wall that touched the stars. It was supposed that no one but the gods could exist above their summits. How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!’

‘How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!’ said Vashti.
…
And that white stuff in the cracks? – what is it?’

‘I have forgotten its name.’

‘Cover the window, please. These mountains give me no ideas.’ … In the evening she looked again. They were crossing a golden sea, in which lay many small islands and one peninsula. She repeated, “No ideas here,” and hid Greece behind a metal blind.

Kuno tells her: the Machine stops. Vashti is horrified. And she refuses to allow this idea. But the Machine does indeed begin to falter and break down. The underground population is trapped and unable to repair the machine or save themselves. Too late, Vashti realizes that her son was right all along. The Machine that served them all would destroy them.

‘We have come back to our own. We die, but we have recaptured life, as it was in Wessex, when Aelfrid overthrew the Danes. We know what they know outside, they who dwelt in the cloud that is the colour of a pearl.’

This is the basic plot of E.M. Forster’s short story The Machine Stops first published in the Oxford and Cambridge Review in 1909. It was a required examination text at my school and I still remember the blue cloth cover of Twentieth Century Short Stories (Egford and Barnes, editors). I thought the story interesting then. I find it even more remarkable now.

In this story Forster foresees the advent of TV, intercontinental air travel, the internet, email and even grief counselors. It predicts a bleak future where humans have lost touch with their humanity and live isolated lives connected mechanically but physically out of touch with each other and the natural world.

Thinking about the Machine is Us/ing Us from an earlier post: What would we do if the machine stopped?

The illustrations are from a 1966 BBC TV production of the story – part of the Out of this World series, and the cover of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop album – the people who gave us the sound track for this film, Dr Who, and a whole raft of other programs.

* On-line text of the story

The Age of Industry

The Age of Industry – that is what Mary Ellen calls kindergarten and this industry was certainly on display in the playground today. There was a potentially poisonous bug to be investigated in the playhouse, milk crates and logs to be hauled uphill in defiance of gravity and surface friction on the snow, and tree displays to be created on the rock. There were all kinds of problems to be solved and each one required high level negotiation and team work For me all this hard work, problem solving and discovery was a lot of fun to watch. It certainly provided me with a wonderful respite in a busy day.

The machine is us/ing us

Take a look at this fascinating video about web 2.0 from Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.
The machine is us.
The machine is using us.
The machine will not stop.

According to Professor Wesch we’ll need to rethink a few things including:
copyright
authorship
identity
ethics
aesthetics
rhetorics
governance
privacy
commerce
love
family
ourselves.
What might all this mean for school 2.0?
For the University of Kansas it clearly means a new course of study: Digital Ethnography

What’s the matter with kids today?*

Why can't they be like we were? Perfect in every way?
What's the matter with kids today?*

BYE BYE BIRDIE (The Musical) (Music by Charles Strouse / Lyrics by Lee Adams)

Technology Literacy and the MySpace Generation

That’s the title of an article by Susan Mclester in Technology and Education (March 15, 2007)

It includes the following:

Listening to the Students

Observing students and making decisions about what they should and should not do and know is one thing. Listening to them speak directly is another. At this year’s Sun Worldwide Education and Research Conference in San Francisco, whose theme was Education 2.0, Santa Clara University’s Lorrie Ma and Darian Shirazi of the University of California at Berkeley addressed an international audience of K-12 and college education professionals.

During an hour-long Q&A session with these students, three clear messages emerged:

Students want free and open access to information. (more)

Social networking hubs are here to stay and should not be constrained by schools.

(more)

The face of education and the idea of the “campus” are changing. (more)

….

His (Shirazi’s) advice for students entering the 21st-century workplace? “This is a cliché, but think outside the box, not about what it takes to get an ‘A,’” he says.

This list comes toward the end comes this list:

Characteristics of 21st-century Learners

Following is a compilation of gleaned from a variety of sources, including an American Association of School Librarians blog, high school and university student interviews, and Kim Jones, vice president of global education for Sun Microsystems.

• Multimedia oriented
• Web-based
• Less fear of failure
• Instant gratification
• Impatient
• Nonlinear
• Multitasker
• Less textual, more modalities
• Active involvement
• Very creative
• Less structured
• Expressive
• Extremely social
• Need a sense of security that they are defining for and by themselves
• Egocentric
• Preference for electronic environments
• Have electronic friends
• Thrive with redefined structure
• Surface-oriented
• Information overload
• Widening gap to information access
• Share a common language
• Risk takers
• Technology is a need
• Aren’t looking for the right answer
• Feel a sense of entitlement
• Constant engagement
• All information is equal
• No cultural distinctions (global)
• Striving to be independent

—with acknowledgment to Diane Beaman

* Not a lot in my experience

Thoughts?

The joy of learning and the expensive English toy

The Indian National Curriculum Framework opens with this most telling childhood anecdote from the poet Rabindranath Tagore:

When I was a child I had the freedom to make my own toys out of trifles and create my own games from imagination…One day in this paradise of our childhood, entered a temptation from the market world of the adult. A toy bought from an English shop was given to one of our companions; it was perfect, big and wonderfully life like. He became proud of his toy and less mindful of the game; he kept that expensive thing carefully away from us, glorying in his exclusive possession of it, feeling superior to his playmates whose toys were cheap….One thing he failed to realize in his excitement ….that this temptation obscured something a great deal more perfect than his toy, the revelation of the perfect child. The toy merely expressed his wealth, but not the child’s creative spirit, not the child’s generous joy in his play, his open invitation to all who were his companions to his play-world.

- from the essay Civilization and Progress

Tagore and Gandhi

photograph by V.N. O’Key

Einstein and Shakespeare

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted

When you need a handy quotation to emphasis a point Einstein and Shakespeare are always there with the bon mot and ready to serve any purpose in or out of context. And so greatness is reduced to the serviceable sound byte. Here Einstein reminds us of the limitations of the obsession with data. Of course it is useful and with the general skepticism about being “opinion rich and data poor” it is essential. But still….

So today, for the first time, my site meter reports that the percentage of hits from the USA on this site has fallen below 75%. I could also tell you the percentages of operating systems and size of the color monitors. Not very interesting or useful. Like a lot of data.

Confronting stereotypes

“Messy, raucous, democratic India is growing fast, and now may partner up with the world’s richest democracy—America.”

- Fareed Zakaria Newsweek (March 6, 2006)

I have never been to India but I have an active imagination and a mental map fueled by literature, film, personal friendships, and an appreciation of Indian food and music. However narrow this perspective these connections have enabled me to create my own personal India – a place of rich history, great beauty, poverty and wealth, full of chaos and contrasts, and linguistic and cultural diversity of all kind. One thing that mental map did not show me was an India as the home of vibrant educational progress and focus on active learning for all children.

The President of the ASCD recently visited India together with his colleagues. He reports:

“Despite a great diversity of approaches, the theme of learning for every child was first and foremost in every school we visited and among the educators with whom we met. Achievement of high test scores is seen by most as secondary to learning. Rather than stressing out about test scores, Indian educators are most concerned with developing students who are able to face future challenges as active learners.”

Government schooling in India is guided by a National Curriculum Framework. Learning it states: “… has become a source of burden and stress on children and their parents is an evidence of a deep distortion in educational aims and quality.” It offers five guiding principles:

• Connecting knowledge to life outside school.
• Ensuring that learning doesn’t rely on rote methods.
• Enriching the curriculum to provide for children’s overall development rather than remaining textbook-centric.
• Making examinations more flexible and integrated with classroom life.
• Nurturing an overriding identity informed by caring concern within the democratic polity of the country.

It adds “teaching should aim at enhancing children’s natural desire and strategies to learn. . . . Knowledge needs to be distinguished from information and teaching needs to be seen as a professional activity, not as coaching for memorization or as transmission of facts”.

The Indian framework is all about enhancing children’s natural love of, and strategies for, learning. It is all about respecting each learner as an individual. It is about and meaningful and inclusive learning. Social justice and the importance of the Arts are highlighted. They are emphasized as vital as a means to help children respond to problems with flexibility and creativity and to help them become participants in a democratic society.

As the imperatives of NCLB lead to more testing, India it seems is headed in the other direction.

This framework challenges my false stereotypes and bodes well for the future of India and the education of its children.