I started this post sitting in a waiting room at the auto shop waiting for my car: No WiFi, pay-for coffee and snacks available. It had an outlet if my laptop battery didn’t hold out, comfortable seats and, if I was interested, a tv to make the experience a little more comfortable. But I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I am a fan of Alan November and I just downloaded, to my iTunes, his November Learning Podcast Series. With ear plugs in and a word doc open, (I would have preferred Google docs), I began listening to Alan November interview Dan Pink.
A little history here…
My first classroom blogging experience was inspired by an Alan November webcast that launched me into my web2.0 experiences… (My teaching2.0? What do you call this transformation?
…And a question on the side…
What do you call a digital ‘immigrant’ that is fully immersed in a digital world? I am an immigrant to Canada, but truly consider myself a Canadian, though I will never be a ‘native’. Perhaps I am a Digital Citizen, or more aptly a Digital Denizen!
| den•i•zen noun formal or humorous an inhabitant or occupant of a particular place : denizens of field and forest. • Brit., historical a foreigner allowed certain rights in the adopted country. |
Here are the highlights of the interviews with my two-dimes worth added in!
Interview 1: With Dan Pink
| Pink Re: Standardized Testing as a measure of a school. “What ultimately I care about is the individual kids, that’s what parents care about and obviously that what the kids themselves care about… if I had a magic wand I would do a very serious, very radical overhaul of the entire education system”. |
We have to be willing to measure these: (From Wikipedia on Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind )
- Design – Moving beyond function to engage the sense.
- Story – Narrative added to products and services – not just argument.
- Symphony – Adding invention and big picture thinking (not just detail focus).
- Empathy – Going beyond logic and engaging emotion and intuition.
- Play – Bringing humor and light-heartedness to business and products.
- Meaning – Immaterial feelings and values of products.
As long as we measure schools and measure students with tests that do not appreciate and include measuring a student’s ability to express these senses, we are measuring the wrong things.
I have an idea: First we will measure a poem with a word count… Then we will measure compassion with a ruler… And finally we will measure the making of a work of art with a stop watch. Then we will add the numbers together and tell you how well your child is doing in school.
From a previous post , “there is a dichotomy here: Our ‘educational language’ around standardization and accountability juxtaposed with differentiation and flexibility… we seem to have two mutually exclusive camps, yet there seems to be a move to embrace both. To embrace both is to accomplish neither.”
Interview 2: Dan Pink
| School architects use a 35-year-old formula, with teachers left out of the conversation… “Appalling that a Starbucks is a more appealing place to be than a classroom. |
It doesn’t have to be more expensive, just smarter. If you built cabinets and shelving units for picture-tube tv’s or carrying cases for Sony Walkman’s and you didn’t adapt your designs, where would you be now?
| Pink: People are opting out of the public/formal education system… “Our education establishment, which we pay lip service to as the most important element of our society, are probably the most out of sync with the realities of 21 century life than any other institution in American society. |
‘This is important! We need to change… pass the chalk’.
| November: Emerging models – Schools… “should be much more embedded in the community, where kids are adding value and making a difference, much more action based.” |
Interview 3: Dan Pink
(The last podcast (#2) ended a discussion about Design: Creating things in context, ideally cross-curricular. This theme continued here.)
| Pink: The two most important things in professional success & personal fulfillment are “intrinsic motivation & persistence.” |
I wonder how much schools pay attention to these two things? Even when we praise, we don’t inspire intrinsic motivation, and although in some ways we promote persistence, we also give students a grade of ‘C’ and move on.
Interview: Dr. Mitchel Resnick (MIT)
Topics: Creativity and Innovation to the Digital Divide
Research group name: Lifelong Kindergarten Group (kindergarten-like exploration and play)
| Many of the best learning opportunities come when people are engaged in creating and designing things. |
Check out http://scratch.mit.edu/ (I’ve been here a few times, but need to explore the possibilities)
|
Sharing… building on other’s ideas… ‘borrowing’ not copying. Give proper credit and acknowledgement and then adapt and go further, and then putting your ideas out there for others to add to. |
This reminds me of the Larry Lessig’s TED Video I recently watched on ‘(Re)-creativity’.
If you give credit, it isn’t ‘appropriates’ but rather ‘appropriate’!
Reinforcing the thoughts of Resnick I recently found this post on the blog of none other than Dan Pink:
| Re: a pop artists exhibit , “The show celebrates the fizzy remixing typical of Pop Art and is replete with “cut up magazines, copied comic books, . . trademarked cartoon characters like Minnie Mouse… But in a bizarre move, the curators have banned photographs — not to protect the physical integrity of the works, but to avoid infringing on the copyright of the creators.” |
The irony is not lost on me.
Originally posted: November 20th, 2007Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: My italicized comments in this post are seeping with sarcasm… which I note and reflect on in my next post. In truth, I’m not a huge fan of podcasts, primarily because I am a very visual learner and also because I have not had a commute longer than 3.5km in the last 9 years. I’m either in the car with others or I’m in the car for 5-7 minutes. So, usually when I’m trying to listen to a podcast is when I have my computer in front of me, (in which case I tend to start reading something else and the podcast becomes background noise). Listening to these podcasts with a word document open for note-taking made them worthwhile to listen to since I could ‘see’ what I was learning from listening. |