formerly, from the ed tech infused garden

A new blog name and image. While my former blog is gone, my experiences roll on. Why change blog site and name? Well, that is the point. Change.

My favorite quote about change is:

Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.

King Whitney Jr.

I am confident things will get better.

a happy medium….

Inspiration comes from surprising sources. This morning in the shower, I found my husband’s shampoo bottle displaying the phrase, “happy medium”, in bold print. As often happens in the shower or while brushing my teeth, some thoughts began percolating through my brain.

At the risk of violating some advertising companies lock on the phrase, I suggest that the phrase,  happy medium, is a good term to contemplate when thinking about learning in a digital world. The medium is the massage has long been what we were told about the media. Is that true of technology in education? Are we “massaging” students’ brains to learn with technology? What is the happy medium for digital learning?

The questions just keep popping into my head, but not so much the answers. Here’s a sample:

1. When you look at the phrase, it can have different interpretations. Example, are we happy with attaining a medium? Would we be happier if it was, Happy excellence, or would we just be really good at something and very content about it? How would that work for Happy small, or Happy failing?  
2. Is the happy or otherwise medium of technology in education floating somewhere near happy medium of student centered and teacher driven classrooms?
3. Are students happier using the MEDIa-um in schools, and if so, so what? I keep reading that anecdotal information is not enough to support large-scale usage of IWB’s or laptops or project based learning. I know, out there toiling away are doctoral candidates hoping they will be the next darling of the-wait for it……..-media-um. They are trying to find the data that will defend their thesis, allow them to publish their dissertation, be invited to present it at a conference, get their blog quoted, maybe secure a professorship or consultancy, and provide sufficient proof for the mass of happy but medium schools that have been waiting and waiting for the log-jam to break. You know, those schools that cautiously dabble with technology;  avoiding doing anything that might alter the way things are done. They wait for the data that will convince the voters, their school boards, their parents, administrators and teachers (everyone except the students….), that digital learning is the new medium. Now, is everybody Happy?
4. Of course, we can’t forget those diviners of truth of the digital spirit world. Sometimes in education, it seemes like we may have way too many, Happy Mediums. The sagacious few who know how to not only interpret the future needs of every child on this planet for the next 91 years, but who will guide us  into that future by interpreting for us what it means to be a really cool 21st century educator.

Enough. Here’s my final thought:  happy medium describes schools and classrooms where teachers are comfortable using technology because it is a happy medium for teaching and learning. Teachers who try new ways of engaging their students, who struggle through the learning curves of laptops, gps units, podcasts, on-line collaboration, etc. They are the Happy Medium for administrators, parents, boards, and colleagues.

Flat Classroom

The Flat Classroom project experience should be commonplace as students lugging backpacks into classrooms. It is a natural evolution of the “pen-pal” collboratives from years back when connections used dial-up. Ah, that lovely little melody of the modems connecting.
I participated in the Flat Classroom, conference model recently. This group of students were remarkably focused or were busy multi-tasking the project while checking their connection richter scales. Adults take so much longer to warm up to group work. The students slid right in to the concept without so much as a, “Ooh, I don’t want to work with her.” That said there was one participant enamored with using the back channel Chatzy to flirt and chat up the virtual participants. I enjoyed reading his quirky story about his one flight into  Qatar.  It was as though he’d never thought he’d actually communicate with someone who actually lived there, let alone a native Qatari. If his group tried to rein him back to the task at hand, I missed it. Although the students I observed were very task oriented, that did not mean there weren’t moments of, “what do you mean you think…..?”
So what is it that is so special about the Flat Classroom? I get the feeling talking with colleagues that they fail to see the benefit. It’s common to use classtime for debate on topics. But usually, we return students to the textbook or research to explain their thoughts. We slap a grade on it and call it good.

But have we ever required our classroom verbal duelists to work together with two or three other heretofore unknown students from completely different backgrounds? Their task being to collaboratively identify the salient points of an issue, identify a workable solution and create a presentation that will convince group of unknown experts that the solution is viable and worthy of support or adoption? This is just a tad bit more than a classroom discussion. Here’s what I wrote as part of a reflective blog on the Flat Classroom Conference ning site:

 

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Flat. The dictionary definition:
1. horizontally level: a flat roof.
2. level, even, or without unevenness of surface

My experience with the Flat Classroom project has twisted that definition just a bit. Students are very uneven, rarely living without an uneven surface. Teachers are perhaps a bit more even simply by the nature of teaching and life experience, but uneven in perspectives.

The process begins with students and teachers who have just met, put rapidly into working groups. Hitting the very level ground quickly to identify backgrounds, experiences, expertise and do all those so uneven human things we do when beginning a new relationship. The concept, task and process identified, its time to dig in to flatten the digital divide.

Our teacher group saw the digital divide not as the Continental divide; more like a DNA strand with access, awareness and experience all in varying quantities. Our group’s digital DNA included varied chronologies, cultural backgrounds, language, technology experience. We were not flat. Our flattening came through listening, agreeing, and sharing.

The flat classroom project is not about creating a flat sameness from the peaks of diversity. It is about recognizing diversity and weaving it into a shared vision of how a problem can be solved. It is learning what it means to be even in understanding and experience and use that to create something new and uneven.

Flat isn’t flat anymore.

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flat is the epitomy of learning at the speed of connectivity

the speed of connectivity?

I am a member of Classroom 2.0.  I try to catch the Elluminate sessions whenever they’re held at the 5:00pm EST because that is perfect for me out here in Asia.

A while back, Steve interviewed Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach. To be honest I was doing my best version of multi-tasking, working at the computer, listening and occasionally popping in to type in a comment. If you followed it, you too heard  Sheryl say (with my paraphrasing),

We have to stop thinking of curriculum as something that is delivered at a certain time, in a certain place (by a certain person).

I have yet to recover.

Later that week I attended the 21st Century Learning Conference in Hong Kong. I participated in the Flat Classroom project with Judy Lindsay. Sheryl’s comment kept bobbing along through my stream of consciousness. I shared it with a few folks there, just to see if anyone else had the same reaction I had or were there already.

For me it was one of those amalgamation moments, when ideas that have been gathered and stored in random order, sequence and chronology, coalesce into one huge, really big, CHA-CHING! Did anyone else hear that gong?

This was not the first time an idea has had such an impact, just the most recent. Maybe I’d heard the idea before, (I have heard Sheryl speak at conferences), maybe I read something similar. But, this time, it connected deeply with all the other related bits of flotsam and Jetsons stored in my brain. It’s not every day we have ideas come at us, then stay around long enough to ultimately change our vision about what we believe, what we think. Learning was unexpected, unplanned, unsolicited.

Connection. I connected with that idea, that day, in that webinar. When I connect with other people, they take what I share, they connect it with others. They may not remember the point of connection, but they make it. And they connect it to something they are doing or someone they are connected with. This is not the 100th monkey theory in digital dress, this is

LEARNING AT THE SPEED OF CONNECTIVITY