Competing for their Hearts and Minds -- #Digcit Thoughts from a RoadTrip Vacation

My wife and I are taking the family on one of those road trips that seem to be a necessary  rite of passage of raising-a-young-family that no one can explain. This post is a collection of reflections made on the journey -- Because you can take the #edtech geek out of the school, but you can't take the school out of the #edtech geek.

Different Tools, Different Data, Different Results
On day three of our journey, we are planning on driving from Atlanta, GA to Raleigh, NC. My wife has been referring to the 4.5 hr journey for a few days, but when talking to our relative in NC, she says it is closer to six hours. She says "But mapquest said it was 4 and a half."

I pull out my Nexus 7 and ask Google Now for a map to Raleigh: Six hours and 15 minutes.

My wife (annoyed): "But why would it change? I Googled it just a few days ago!"
Me (in interesting-conversation-about-tech-mode when I should have been in husband-consoling-wife-who-has-had-her-plans-derailed-mode): I thought you said you had used Mapquest?
Wife (now annoyed at me): I used something. Why would they be different?

...and while i could think of all sorts of reasons for differences including accuracy of routes, real-time information (those cool Google cars), differing calculation methods, real-time traffic or construction updates (not to mention any number of human error issues), I had picked up on the fact that this was NOT the conversation my vacation planner and mother of my children wanted to have...but it got me thinking.

The Information Conundrum

Waze Crowd-sourced mapping

What my wife experienced  is an increasingly common occurrence  People in stop-and-go traffic who pull up
a traditional GPS will often be frustrated by a red (slow) traffic line, but little information. But if that same person is using an app called WAZE, they can get minute-by-minute updates from real users, including the guy 2 miles ahead saying "they have the semi off the road now. traffic should start moving any minute." And while mapping and travel seem to be one of the easy highlights (Apple's early foray's into maps was well-documented as one of the companies few but often entertaining stumbles), there are a number of areas where we are beginning to see this issue arise for our students.

The internet houses websites and blogs galore which at first glance can appear to have valid information. However, as the ease of creating and distributing information has increased, we have not had a corresponding rise in our capacity as humans to filter through this information and distinguish bad information from good. And this is not just a situation created by the rise of the blogosphere.

Billboards and Displays of Competing World Views
As we are travelling down the highway on the way to Raleigh, I see a billboard that shows a caveman fighting/running from an old-style Tyrannosaurus Rex (you can tell older depictions from the positioning of the tail. If it drags on the ground Godzilla-style, its based on older anthropological models). It is an advertisement for a Creationist Museum - a concept I am familiar with due to our proximity to one in Kentucky -- I just didn't realize that they had franchised.

The newest creation museum advertising eliminates the "controversy"
in favor of the draw of Dinosaurs. Thunder lizards are cool.

There are currently 16 Creationist Museums. These museums are typically privately funded with a

combination of models, animatronic displays, professionally produced videos and interactive activities typical of the modern museum experience. In fact, the many of the museums get high reviews from visitors and have been featured as tourist destination highlights. What is noteworthy about these museums is that the exhibits are based on young-earth/creationism interpretations of the origin of life and the planet.

The "Come Meet Your Relatives" sign outside the
Mammal wing of the Museum of Natural History

Either the Earth is 4.54 Billion years old or it's 6,000 years old. Relativism, while popular as a moral stance (that will be a rant for another day), is not as easily applied to geology.

But thousands of people a year visit these museums that cost millions of dollars in order to learn from what National Center for Science Education director Eugene Scott called " the Creationist Disneyland". The discussion that ensued in the car-ride ranged from young-earth positions, to carbon dating, to evolution and catholic teaching. It led to one of our daughters pointing out the number of evolution references made at the Smithsonian Museum for Natural History (although the Gem displays were the biggest hit).

The point here is not good science vs. bad science. (see the original #savethedinosaurs post for some of that). There are two highly funded competing world views fueled by scientific method, research, religion, morality and money that are vying for the eyes, hearts, and minds of our students.

• What are the specific skills that students need to develop in order to function in this world of competing information and data?
• Regardless of the status of the Common Core and its corporate sponsored testing offspring, what should schools be doing to put in place the development of these skills and habits-of-mind? 
• At what age do our students have to develop the capacity to use their skills and capacity for rational thought to determine which of these world views they will subscribe to and follow?

#Edtech, #Digcit, and #BYOT -- Identifying the Essential Skills
1. Claim and Analysis: Students must be able to find factual claims within a piece of writing, be it a tweet, Facebook vanity card, news article, or research paper. They should be able to identify and evaluate the supporting evidence (or in most cases lack thereof) which supports the claim.

Practically Applied: We use the student newspaper. Preliminary questions we ask are:

• Do you trust this source? 
• What reasons do you have in-source for this trust? 
• What reasons do you have beyond the source for this trust?

2. Identifying Assumptions: World views are loaded with assumptions of truth. Identifying these assumptions and treating them as claims that can also be analyzed for support is a key activity in the high-data, conflicting conclusion modern age. The process of uncovering assumptions can be difficult to teach/learn, in part because human brains use assumptions to process data efficiently in the best of situations (and with all of the data produced in the world today, it is NOT the best of situations.

Practically Applied: Use a series of regressive questions as part of the research process when students are beginning to identify primary research questions and problems:

• What is the problem that you have identified?
• Why is that a problem?
• What information do you need to formulate a solution?
• What sources can provide that information?
• Are there experts in the area who believe that it is not a problem?
• What are their reasons for believing it is not a problem?

3. Closed Systems of Information, Silo Thinking, and Confirmation Bias: The goals of hardware, software, and information providers in the modern business-oriented world is lock-in. This is the tendency to go to the same well for information and solutions. Again, this is an aspect of human nature - habits help solve recurring problems efficiently. Thus, Google wants you to constantly go to its website for the answer. Apple and Amazon are both creating stores of information and data access so that you never have to go to the Big-G for an answer. Fox, MSNBC, CNN are all competing for your eyeballs, your homepage, your attention and your trust. As you spend more time within one system, you find that the answers reinforce eachother on two levels: All of the answers seem to tie together, painting a coherent view of reality and all indications then seem that this source of information is a good source to rely upon in the future.

Practically Applied: Teach social media as a tool and not a distraction. Students should be working from a young age to a) question the reliability of information sources and b) build a system of information sources that intentionally have multiple viewpoints, biases, and information.

An early social network activity we use is to identify social media sources within a student's personal network. Count the number of friends, relatives, celebrities, news sources. Then rank those sources along different perspectives such as politics (conservative/liberal, Big/Small government), religious perspective, value of formal education, etc. Many of our students find that they are likely to have a network that feeds their own pre-existing world view and that the ideas presented are strikingly similar across social media.


4. Variety of Tools and Sources. An unanticipated side-effect of the 1:1 BYOT implementation at the school is the in-depth discussions about methodology, whether it is for creating a presentation or finding information. In a world where each student brings a device and the device is the choice of the family/student, there are a lot of tools in each classroom. Students begin to discuss and share problem-solving strategies naturally and teachers can foster this sharing with directed activities.

Practically Applied: Focus on process over product. Have students keep a process journal as part of each major assignment. Use the journal as a part of reflective and sharing activities. As different conclusions are reached, the student's become better equipped to un-pack how they reached a specific answer and why that answer was different from the conclusion of another member of the class.

On Reflection
None of these applications are easy and very few of them can be answered with a click or a filled-in bubble.We have found that the amount of time we spend on individual projects grows as we add in time to use regressive questioning in the beginning and time to pair-and-share process reflections in the drafting stage of papers and presentations.

But this is a part of the answer to the issue of information overload and over-reliance on data-without-depth.

Our call as educators is to helps student identify not just the correct answers to the questions on a test but the underlying systems that produced those questions-and-answers in the first place. Corporations  governments, and organizations are all to willing to have reliable consumers and followers.

We should accept nothing less than independent thinkers.
Our children deserve it.

More than just a consumer and political pawn

Designing for #DigCit -- an #ICE2012 Presentation

What a great conference. Indiana Computer Educators is an annual gathering of tech-geeks and teach-geeks from around the state and elsewhere. I will probably blog some reflections soon, but first I wanted to get this posted.

The @40ishoracle and I presented on Professional Development, specifically our open, education centered format in the BYOT environment.

We also presented on the Digital Citizenship program that is our required Freshman Computer Applications Course. The presentation that we used is here:

As always, we welcome your feedback and questions. This was new presentation for us and we are always looking for ways to improve. Don't forget to leave feedback, follow the blogs, and say "Hi" to us on Twitter :)

On stopwatches, Fairness & Testscores: We Trained Them Well

Student: "Can you just give me the 'book' answer?"
Me: "We don't use a book in this class"
Student: "You are exasperating."

The @40ishoracle and I have had an running theme for the last few weeks. My approach from the student perspective and hers from the teachers. We have decided to write duelling blogs on the topic of "We have trained them well." Read her reflection on teachers here.

Vignette 1: Missed Opportunities

I want to start with one of my favorite teachers. He is a strong presence in the classroom who creates an environment where students feel comfortable exploring complicated questions of faith, justice, and religion. He is typically recognized by excellent students as one of the strongest teachers they have had.  He sees his calling as one of planting seeds, equipping students with thoughts and skills that may be used years down the road.

During lunch one day, he described a day in his classroom. A student was sharing a reflection, showing a video. The teacher said the context, presentation, and subject matter were visually and emotionally moving. Yet as he looked at the classroom, his students were disengaged. They were not being rude. There was no doodling, or sleeping, or gaming, or surfing. Just a strong detachment from the moment and the opportunity they had been given to experience something profound. It was disappointing for this teacher who has had a rough time with freshman this year.

Vignette 2: Claim Analysis Project

Students use collaborative notetaking to capture ideas
from discussion  complete with comments

One of the primary skills in the Digital Citizenship class (#digcit) is the development of information analysis skills. As the media becomes more and more biased and social media allows us to live in echo chambers of our own making (see the original post on the PLNs or the #theatershooting analysis), it is important for students to be able to dissect news and opinion pieces for grains of truth and boulders of bias.

Assignment: Students took two articles from the first issue of the student newspaper: one news, one op-ed. The students were given five minutes to read one of the articles and reflect on the following:

• do you believe the information given in the article?
• what is it about the article or the context that makes you trust (or distrust) the information?

Students were then put into groups of three to share their reflections. It was at that moment that I began to notice that this lesson was not going to go as planned.

One group, the most vocal and active, sat in a straight line. They were discussing, but clearly not engaged in the assignment. It was a factual exchange of information that scratched the surface. More disturbing was the group of students who sat silently with their heads down staring blankly at the news-article. -- silence.

When I prompted them to interact, "The next step is to share what you three are discussing...you might want to, you know, discuss", one of the students looked at me and said, "I don't understand."

"Did you believe what is being stated in the article?" [Task Comprehension]

"I don't know"

"Ok. What is your gut feeling? Accurate or not?" [Start at the basics and build]

"I'm not sure what you mean. Do you think the article is accurate?"

"Why does that matter? I want to see how you processed the information." [Technically I should have gone with another question, but I was getting a that tickly feeling teachers sometimes get -- this could be important]

"I don't want to be wrong. It is not fair for you to ask us a question that we do not know the answer too. You already know the answer. You are just being mean."

There it was. 

And two other students nodded.

The lesson went...ok. By the end of class, students were able to identify the difference between a CLAIM being made and the DATA or ANALYSIS that might show that a claim is indeed true. But that look of helplessness stuck with me.

A Reflection

This year's Freshmen were in kindergarten one year after I left the public school system. While there were a number of reasons I left (one of which was a starry-eyed dream that I would be a stay-at-home Dad and read comicbooks to my baby all day long), part of it was a growing dissatisfaction with test-culture. I taught remedial English to students who had already failed the state exit exam and where preparing to take it a second, third, or fourth time.

Students in the #digcit class due a sorting activity to
identify best sources for  research

I remember long discussion with my wife (then in medical residency) about the dichotomy of this teaching assignment. If I could teach them to think and communicate effectively, to provide a base-level of understanding, they would have a good shot at passing the exam, but there were years of apathy and a ton of factors beyond my control. However, if I went straight for the test -- drilled vocabulary, taught a formulaic writing system that graders (or auto-graders) would be able to checklist through quickly, taught ways to game the natural flaws in a testing system -- I was pretty sure most of the kids would have a good shot at passing.

I tried it both ways. At the end of the "test prep" semester, I was told by the administration that they wanted me to have a training session with other teachers on how I had taught so many kids so well -- 80% pass rate. That was the writing on the wall for my tenure in public schools

Vignette 3: The Magic Formula

A student working on an essay assignment had gathered all of the information for the paper. As students began writing rough drafts, a number of hands went into the air:
"How many sentences have to be in a paragraph?"
"Does the thesis have to be at the end of the third paragraph?"
"I am writing my outline first. What do you want to read in paragraph two?"

The communication aspect of the essay was lost. This was not informative or persuasive. This was writing by formula. As the questions continued and the answers were clearly not "8 sentences" or "Yes", the students began sharing their experience in other classes and at other schools. They described teachers who set arbitrary minimums as a quick way to encourage depth and critical thinking or a formulaic structure as a surefire ways to pass the standardized test (cold chills went through my spine). What struck me was that students had internalized the rules without understanding the reasoning -- the goal was to think deeply, not to churn out eight complete phrases.

We have trained them well

The mantra for the last few weeks as @40ishoracle and I have been discussing with teachers, students, and our twitter PLNs is, "We have trained them well"

• We have trained students that there is one correct answer
• We have trained students that the one correct answer is known by the teacher and/or the test grader
• We have trained them that there is (usually) a simple formula for determining that answer - a process to solve the problem, a structure for an essay, a list of terms to memorize.

We train them by showing them a video that walks through the steps of solving a problem but does not explain why those steps lead to the solution. We train them when they are taught that a science experiment is following the step-by-step guide of a demonstration. We train them with worksheets, one-answer textbooks questions, and tests...lots of tests.

The stopwatch is not the race. Certainly not the runner. Test Insanity #edchat #antitest - Tutors for kindergartenerswashingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-s…
— JD Ferries-Rowe (@jdferries) September 21, 2012

At the point that parents are hiring tutors to help kids with the testing in Kindergarten, the time has come to revisit the system. One of the businessmen that we work with has recognized this need as well. He puts it succinctly: "We are reaping what we have sown". 15 years ago businesses were calling for graduates who could communicate effectively, work well with teams, and work independently without a heavy hand guiding them each step of the way. 15 years later, the American Associations of College and Universities points out that things have not changed all that much:

1. The ability to work well in teams—especially with people different from yourself
   
2. An understanding of science and technology and how these subjects are used in real-world settings
   
3. The ability to write and speak well
   
4. The ability to think clearly about complex problems
   
5. The ability to analyze a problem to develop workable solutions
   
6. An understanding of global context in which work is now done
   
7. The ability to be creative and innovative in solving problems
   
8. The ability to apply knowledge and skills in new settings
   
9. The ability to understand numbers and statistics
   
10. A strong sense of ethics and integrity 

What has changed is our approach to education. In pursuit of these goals (or in pursuit of unstated goals such as cost-savings or opening the educational marketplace), we have developed a system that substitutes opportunities for reflection and teamwork with additional assessments. These assessments to not promote problem analysis or creative solutions -- they look for formulaic methods that give a single scorable answer.

Just read number 8 and think about the student who called lesson was "unfair".

When Yong Zhao presented to the educators and technologists at the  ISTE12 Keynote, he noted that while America obsesses over global test scores, the rest of the world is busy working on creating innovated geniuses: problem solvers, creators, communicators -- those things that have traditionally kept the U.S ahead of the technology and industry game despite high labor costs, lower population numbers, and bad test scores (remember, the US has never excelled in standardized testing worldwide).

But there is hope:

• Math classes that give the answers to the homework but look to the students' process to arrive at that answer.
• #Flipclass and No-homework programs that de-emphasize content transfer and emphasize the rich interaction that are capable in a classroom the individualizes and provides opportunity for collaboration
• The growing number of #digcit and #byot programs that emphasize processing and problem solving as well as information literacy and communications. As these systems replace push-button training classes, students are exposed to more opportunities to identify and solve problems rather than follow a pre-selected path to a single answer.
• History and Social Studies classes that are rejecting textbook summaries of events in exchange for time spent interpreting and analyzing history through primary source and historical documents.
• Schools with a mission to educate and form the whole person rather than force an unnatural separation by subject areas.

But these hopeful techniques and movements are a gamble. Because if "success" is designated by a score on a standardized test, rather than the development of creativity and innovation, then we run the risk of denigrating the best programs in favor of "test-prep" environments. Worse, we are creating a system that measures students, rewards teachers, and honors school systems for creating students that do not have the skills that we want in either our well-informed citizenry or our innovative workforce.

Its time for the student-based-objective to focus primarily on the student.

Its time to focus on the race and runners and not the stopwatch.

Its time to stop training and start teaching.

Centennial Post - Deciphering The (Lexile ) Numbers - Education as Big Business

Preface: The Score Letter
I think every family with two working adults and multiple school-age children has that table that gathers piles of paper. You know the one that I mean. Our main one (because we have many) is the kitchen island. One stack is generally for comic books and various non-urgent papers, another stack is bills, and my wife has her own stack of "i will go through these as soon as I have a spare moment...say 2020?" papers. My children have followed the example of the parents with stacks of "you may want to look at these" papers (in which every permission slip, late homework notice, etc. invariably ends up). When I got home one night last week, I noticed an official letter on the top stack for my eldest, the ten-year-old Daughter Prime.

The letter described a formal exam taken by all students to determine her LEXILE score. The score, the letter went on to explain, was a measure of reading comprehension that had been validated seven ways from Sunday and had a great many uses for teachers and parents. I could find out more information by going to Lexile.com and reading about the score there.
End Preface

Thoughts on Milestones and Education Reform
As I write this post, my hundredth on the geekreflection site since @40ishoracle and I decided it would be a hoot to share our thoughts with the world, I have been thinking about the changes that have been happening in education in the short time since i set foot in the classroom 15 years ago. Back then, high-stakes testing was not a significant focus of classroom activity nor was it a significant piece of the educational dialogue. In most schools, students were told that it was a measure of what you had learned in class and was not something over which you should stress. Exit exams were in place at the high-school level and classes had been created to prepare or remediate the lowest potential scorers, but it had not affected the students who were likely to pass (note: i spent my first three years of teaching in low-track and test remediation courses -- the youngest teachers often did).

The tide had not yet turned against teachers in the political rhetoric. Our job was still considered professional and difficult and while there was a murmur of anti-union rhetoric starting, it did  not have the venom that is present in today's attacks on teachers. Movies that were made talked about difficult environments and socially ingrained issues (which could include clueless administrators and burned out teachers) but often focused on the need for committed and dedicated adults as a key factor in turning around a troubled school (note: this is still presumed to be true in the sound-bytes of most politicians, just not in any of the legislation that they produce).

Education as a business was beginning to gain some ground with charter schools being touted as the market-based solution to the woes of the most struggling schools. The focus on the profitability of the classroom was limited to textbook publishers and a few very specific educational technology providers, particularly in Math and Science. Today, my mailbox fills up with catalogs promising me improved test scores, pre-packaged curricula that strives to take the wild-card factor of the teacher out of the equation as much as possible, and every kind of metric-based, value-added software on the planet to pre-test, address, student-personalize, and teacher-assess my way to a bright future where we will be competitive with the overseas armies of better standardized testers.

Interlude: A Look into Lexile
My wife, having read the letter, asks me what a lexile of "1377" actually means. I had no idea. So we went to the website. On the website, we learned that:

• The Lexile was not a grade-based equivalent score (you should not use this to see how your student is doing in class or how a school program is doing in preparing your child)
• The Lexile is not a comparative - no data will be released or found on where your child is in comparision to other children of the same age or grade
• The Lexile is an independent measure of comprehension, measured on its patented scale - don't try to use this score to draw any conclusions whatsoever about - well - anything.

In fact, the only thing that we were supposed to use the Lexile score to do was to type it into a database to find Lexile-scored books that would be appropriate for my 10 year old to read.

That's it. Plug the number and get the book list. So that is what we did...
End Interlude.

Choosing Between Two Masters
The disturbing part about the education-as-business model is not that there are people who want to make money off of education. We live in a capitalistic world. If there is a market, someone will make money. The disturbing part is that this system, devoid of any kind of common-sense oversight (dare I say it, "regulation") can easily twist itself into the worst the marketplace has to offer. Think of the millions (low estimate) of dollars being spent by school districts to measure teacher value-add. School districts that are cutting teachers and support staff, raising class sizes, and choosing refurbished netbooks for their students are investing in a resource that has dubious validity in improving actual learning and slightly less dubious validity in improving test scores. Maybe the money should be spend in actually validating a connection between test scores and learning...or test scores and teacher effectiveness...or test scores and -- any connection -- that would at least be some interesting research.

Interlude II: Plugging and Chugging
The Lexile choose-a-book system is relatively simple. Enter the score and press enter. There is even a place to enter some rudimentary information to try to get a book list without the Lexile score (grade level, reading easy/hard, etc.). Once the score is entered, you select categories. My daughter is into post-apocalyptic dystopias (Hunger Games; Among the Hidden), so I chose sci-fi/fantasy. and the results (drumroll please):

The recommendations for a Lexile of 1377. Witchcraft and Eroticism

Well, that was disturbing. After repeated attempts, I could pull nothing but literary criticism. I am not sure if there is age-appropriate lit.crit for a ten year old, but I prefer to think that if it exists, it does not articulate the correlation between sex and science-fiction.

Fotunately, there are some limiters by age as well as Lexile score, so i decided to play around with those as well. I chose to limit the age range between 10-12. As a proud parent, I had to give her a few more years of range.

The good news is that the limiters did erase some of the suggestions. The bad news is that a) my daughter was still stuck firmly in the world of literary criticism (does no one in the 1300 range read fiction?) and many of the titles that I thought a little mature for the pre-teen set were still suggested:

YES MEANS YES: Straight feminism fun with fetishes...

Clearly being a dad has turned me into a prude. I noted the book to download into my wife's Kindle and decided to start over from the beginning. Cleared my cache. Entered 6th Grade, reads above her grade level. The results: lots of lit.crit. I narrowed the categories to fiction only. Those results constituted the type of writing that would drive children of all ages far from reading.

Finally, despondent, I re-entered a lexile range, limited to age 11-12 (i was a little weary), and limited it to straight fiction...no more choice reading for my daughter:

One Book Available

There you have it. One book available. The 208 pages MONSTER MEN by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Happy reading, dear.
End Interlude

A Twisted Business
This summer, I got to listen to Sal Khan describe the humble beginnings of the Khan Academy: a tutorial for a young, bright relative who was struggling with math. This was before his dream of providing "a world class education to any child, anywhere". This was before Microsoft founders and the Gates Foundation labeled this system a great boon to education.  As I listened to him, the image that I could not shake was that he was sincere and inspiring. That his simple idea and aspirations for a future where money and location did not preclude access to an education, had been perverted by politicians and businessmen who saw the potential to sell a system that could replace teachers.

He specifically responds to critics, saying that the videos make excellent supplements to the relationship between the teacher and student necessary in the best of educational environments. And yet, entire charter schools are set up with Khan-Cubicle formats for learning math. Teachers are threatened subtly and not-so-subtly with replacement by video or replacement by younger teachers -- well, both methods are at least cost effective.

Reflection: This Piper Must be Paid
When I asked librarians about the Lexile, they had all heard of it. All knew that it was a measure of reading comprehension, had some vague memories of it being used to mark books. None of the librarians I talked to recalled using it as an essential instrument in helping students choose books. These librarians had list-servs, colleagues, recommendations from other students, and their own training and experience. They did not need these scores. But that was then...

The same school district that provided this most-excellent diagnostic resource is clustering or eliminating librarian positions. In some cases, schools are fortunate to have a librarian assistant a few days a month. No time to create effective book clubs, setup programs for encouraging reading, or learn enough about a class's context, let alone an individual student's to recommend a good book. Now we use Lexiles.

(note: in direct violation of the spirit of the score, the Lexile is also used by the district as a contributing piece of data to determine who needs additional reading resources. Evidently someone is willing to match the number to a reading level).

• The Lexile system is contracted out to standardized tests in order to provide scores to test-taking school districts - money.
• Publishers work to have their catalogs scored and listed on the ever-important find-a-book list - more money.
• School districts test students independently to give students a lexile score - even more money.

Money that could be spent on books
Money that could be spent on librarians
Money that could be spend on teachers

But politicians want numbers and companies want money.
Its just too bad that the students are the ones who end up paying.

The Information Skills for the 24/7 News Cycle Age: An Analysis of the Reporting of #theatershooting

Abstract: an analysis of high-impact news stories and the 24 hour analysis-reporting cycle as it impacts the teaching of communications and information literacy.

I think the best description of the news-commentary-begets-more-news cycle I have heard came from Jon Stewart on the daily show. I looked (lightly) for the specific clip, but could not find it. If I do, I will be sure to link to it (thx to commenter Slowdog for the link). Essentially:

• News Channel Reports factual data
• During the commentary/analysis period, the data is interpreted to draw a more meaningful/slanted conclusion to the benefit of the station, political bias, commentator, ratings, etc.
• During the next NEWS period, the conclusion is reported as breaking news about the original story citing experts, sources, etc.

This is one of the examples that we use in #digcit to discuss PLN bias and the need to be more savvy about news in the modern era than ever before.

Tragic News Reporting in a 24/7 World

When I woke up this morning, I had every intention of working on a blog post ranting on the House committee hearings to give "Highly Qualified" designation to Teach-for-America graduates or finish up my #bbw12 posts with thoughts on the last keynote...

but, when it rains, it pours.

The first item on my news-reader described the tragedy of the Colorado shooting at the premiere of "Dark Knight Rises" midnight showing -- details are still coming in about this awful event (which is part of the point) and I will leave it to others to assign blame and find meaning...that is for another day and more ambitious people than me.

As I walked into the living room, the TV was already on a national news channel piecing together information and trying to put some meaning or reason upon the chaos. There were very few details at that point and within about 30 minutes the repeat of information made it clear that all of the essential data that the news had, I had absorbed. One hour later (Note: I am in a house full of people watching the news -- my inclination would have been to change the channel -- "0" on Feeling according to the Myers-Briggs), only one new piece of information was being reported:

the mother of the suspect had said to ABC news, "You have the right person. I need to call the police. I need to fly to Colorado," (exact words from Mercury News).

When the mother's statement was released, a careful caveat was given, namely that the statement a) could have been nothing more than confirming a name, b) could be that statement of a person in shock or coping with overwhelming information (certainly), c) did not imply much of anything on face.

My wife and I left the cabin to replace a flat tire.

When we returned, the news was still on. There was still only one story. The significant change was that we had moved out of the fact-news part of the news cycle/day and into the commentary part of the day, which was filled with analysis..

A few hours later, the mother's same statement was being picked apart by multiple retired profilers, three news analysts, and a supplemental scroll of social media commentary along the bottom of the screen. One expert went so far as explain that this mother's statement along with the incident itself was enough to show that there would probably have been indications of psychopathic tendencies demonstrated as early as age 5 (I added the emphasis) - so much for those caveats, neh?

As the afternoon commentary gave way to a news break, my jaw dropped as the news reporter updated the facts of the case known, including a tidbit that experts have begun piecing together a profile of the suspect, including potential childhood signs of behavior. After searching for an hour, looking through different sources, and checking my handy-dandy PLN, there was no indication of this information beyond the speculative comment of one person who had researched no background, conducted no personal interviews, and had no firsthand contact with the suspect, parents, neighbors, or even a kindergarten teacher.

The Stewart Cycle was complete.

Reflection: The Impact of the News-Commentary Symbiosis on Classroom Teaching

I hesitated to write this one so early, since I do NOT want to trade on the misery of others (even we strong "T"s have some couth). But this was such a clear example of something that I suspect goes on every single day. And, if it does, we need to completely rework what we think of in terms of Communications 101, the teaching of research and biases, and even some of the newer lessons on #infowhelm such as PLN development and filtering skills.

Roughly speaking, students should be developing the following skills or, lacking that, should be learning systems that will give them the following information:

Trackback Mechanisms: The ability to trace the origin of a piece of information to its original source. This becomes particularly complicated in the 24-hour news-commentary-news cycle since the need to tag sources in a 30 second soundbyte is often severely diminished to "experts" or "this just in, some say that..."

Development of Strong, Muli-level, Variable bias PLNs: A persons learning network, the web of trusted sources, must include more than echo-chamber inducing conclusions, particularly in an age where commentators provide the analysis that becomes the next hour's news brief. This will be a longer post as we get closer to the school year and the information literacy/research section of the #digcit class. (I started discussing this as it applies to classrooms here, applied to to politics in the Big Tents post, and added a little bit of religion to the mix in this post --ok, this one i think about a lot).

Opportunities to practice Claim Analysis: So much of what we are told takes place in a tone of incontrovertible facts (complete with colorful infographics) that we must allow students the chance to pick apart the actual data and see if the conclusion matches. We cannot rely on the the fact-checking of the news agencies, but must instead use their articles as the source of our own fact-checking.

Credential Analysis: I watched at one point as a CIA profiler, an FBI former profiler, and a psychiatrist who consulted on multiple spree killings went at each other in a barely moderated forum. They referred to the others as ill-informed, dangerous, and irresponsible. I am sure that it made for great TV, but in terms of developing any kind of understanding of the topic at hand, the undercutting made for awful conclusion drawing. We must help students develop a filter of not just information but also a filter of the credentials of potential sources. The critical questioning ability that used to only be necessary for reporters, lawyers, and job interviewers is now an essential skill for well-informed citizens in general.

This is in addition to an added emphasis on the development of information filtering systems (both automated such as RSS feeds and manual scans for much of what was describe above). And introductory lessons on logical constructions and common logical fallacies, would probably also be necessary to be able to pick apart some of the issues I have described.

Where do we teach this? At Brebeuf Jesuit, the first taste of this will come formally in the Digital Citizenship class. Every Freshman takes the course. In order to increase the time given to this we have moved away from other topics that we have felt are less vital. But a one semester freshman class will not be enough. Opportunities to practice this level of information criticism must be used throughout high-school and college (and probably introduced even earlier). Application opportunities exist in Social Studies, English, Religion and more.

We are past the time where we can rely on the conclusions of experts and those who interview the experts to act as our filters. We are past the time where students need only be taught to make sure that a source has the  proper bona fides to be trusted.

It is time that we take responsibility for our own information management systems and develop tools and curriculum that provide students the skills and capacity to take responsibility for theirs.

Educational Analytics: A #bbw12 Idea that Might Not Be Ready for Prime(number) Time

JDs note: This was originally going to be my final blogpost from #bbw12. Turns out I had a lot to say about analytics. Khan Academy Keynote review later in the week.

I am sitting on a porch lakeside in Michigan trying to get motivated to write the last blog on #bbw12. Although, as we get farther and  farther away from the sultry weather, the dazzling lightshows, and amazing food, I realize that there are only a few more things to cover...Away we go...

But first...

Interlude: G-drive and Chromebooks go great together
When I powered up my chromebook yesterday (yes, I have been thinking about typing for over a day now), I was happy to see an upgrade for the old Chromium OS. Clicked the restart and when I logged in, didn't notice much difference. But as I started to flip through G+ photos to prepare for the blog and some updates to the IHSFA website (yeah, I got a webmaster gig), Look what I saw:

Screen capture, saved to G-Drive, Edited in Aviary, Linked to Blog - Cloud Win

first mentioned way back in my "To the Clouds" review of G-drive and apps, I longed for my G-drive to be integrated into the file system of the chromebook so that other apps would see the files with save&open functionality. Now its a reality. Haven't played much to see if it hold cross-users, but this boosted my productivity a lot.

End Interlude

An Introduction to Analytics: What they are, why they matter and what educators need to know

I wish that title described what this blog was going to be about, but I am not sure if I was able to glean from this session what the succinct description said it would be about. So here's what i got:

Ellen Wagner, @edwsonoma, gave the presentation. All credit to her, she made me think a lot about analytics. The session began with a picture on the screen of a tornado barreling down the road -- the simple message: analytics are not going anywhere. We need to learn how to deal with them in education.

She began by describing the levels and roles of analytics. It is not just seeing patterns in data...in fact, that might be considered the lowest level of analysis. It is also looking to find actions that can be taken based on those patterns to influence outcomes. Even better, to be able to predict actions that WILL BE TAKEN based on the digital breadcrumbs left of actions that were taken in the past. Sounds like a lot of science fiction? It probably should: This is what Google, Amazon, and other big-techs have been working on for years (Note from speaker: I won't even go to a shopping website that doesn't have a decent suggestion engine). As data migrates to the cloud and computers have the power locally or cloud-based to crunch the numbers, these predictions become a lot more useful than knowing that JD will buy anything featuring JoCo or @feliciaday.

OK: lots of data. Lots of computing power. We will have the ability to predict and work in advance instead of constantly playing a reactionary game of catch-up. No problems so far...

Question One: To Mine or not-to-mine
Wagner draws a distinction between research, which is predominately empirical analysis and business use, which is a lot of predictive data-mining. "We have been trained that data mining is bad," she notes. She then goes on to explain differences on the structure, collection, and tools based on these two different outlooks. But she begged a question that was not ever answered? Is Data Mining Bad or were we all taught wrong in our master's classes? It is not enough to say, "Business does it". If there are inherent problems with data-mining, those need to be addressed BEFORE we adopt these processes as the educational norm.

She reiterates that educational data is already being tracked and crunched now and that there is no way to avoid it. She talks about analytics maturing to be the biggest thing to hit the classroom since computers


She points out that we (and by "we" she means "the data whisperers" -her AWESOME term - who do this analytic magic) are not sure where to start, which metrics will be most useful, or which permutations to use. -- No wonder some educators are nervous!

She lays out some of the challenges: siloed data (LMS, transactions and outcomes, latent data, demographic data, perceptual data, financials, operations... *whew*). She lays out some of the methodological differences that need to be addressed (including that data-mining question above). She refers to this and the half-hearted attempt to analyze this as leading to "bowls of data spaghetti"

Question Two: Which is the Dog? Which is the tail?

Another challenge she draws out but does not pin down is the move to personalize education. She acknowledges that personalization does (and may continue to) play directly against the need to extract normalized and useable data for the prediction engines. Wow. When put that way, i have a sinking feeling that all of these data acolytes might just be paying lip-service to Student-Centered learning -- say it ain't so Gates Foundation!

Her penultimate example was Moneyball -- a baseball team using analytics to analyze what it takes to win so that they could hire accordingly. "They solved their problems through recruiting...we will have to do it through other means" -- don't get excited. She didn't say what those means were.

#bbw12 Day 1 (part a): In the future, #iceiscold + Sightseeing

Woke up after an intense first half-day of Blackboard World. This may be a pattern given that I started #iste12 blogging the same way, but I think I might line-by-line the day and see if anything pops out for anyone. If you want expansion, are here and would like to add, or see something wrong, please feel free to comment below.

Monday Night: DevCon Party
We crashed. It was so classic as they searched for our names on a list and we laid down the "but we know a guy line". I felt like I was in a bad 80s moving trying to get into the club with all the cool kids. Yeah, I said it, at Blackboard World, the developer's are the new kids.

He who controls the camera...
Expect a lot of @40ishoracle pix

• I met the new CTO of Edline Blackboard Engage, he has been in the position about 3 mos. The @40ishoracle and he talked Apple interface issues and dreamed of JD taking attendance on the chromebook.
• I had a lovely conversation with a lady dressed right out of the SCA who turns out to be so high up in the Blackboard echelon that her title is almost as obscure as when I was dubbed "Director of Strategery" -- that may have been her title, actually.
• We played wall flowers while our friend @phjmille was dragged onto the dancefloor by a sultry vampire, a scruffy werewolf, and Jake from the Blues Brothers. 
• Highlight of the evening was when the amazing band solo'd through each instrument on "So you say it's your birthday" in celebration of Heather who made the most of the spotlight.

(and now you know what happens when geeks get down - jealous yet?)

Tuesday - Before the Con:

...and food.

• Wandering the streets of New Orleans in search of beignets (found them along with crawfish omelets and scones)
• Wandered through the rain ("oh, so that's what rain is like" said the drought-stricken midwesterners)
• Registered and with three hours to kill went Catholic Tourist sight seeing.

Interlude: (as if this whole section weren't and interlude)
I love talking to people who make their living on the street and when a shoe-shiner caught my eye, just couldn't resist. Hats off to him, cause he was smooth and knew how to play the game, complete with 10-ccent wisdom, a partner who showed cash from another happy customer, and politeness to Jen. He didn't get $20 dollars off of me for a spitshine, but he did try his best. "The punchline is "you got them ON YOUR FEET"
End Interlude

Breakout Session One: "The Future of Interactive Education"

This was presented by Kate Worlock (awesome name) who works for OUTSELL, a technology number-crunching company. She positioned her talk well at the beginning of the day, laying out trends and themes to keep in mind for the rest of the conference.

While I am a sucker for a british accent, there was a lot of #iceiscold remarks. I guess that the data supports it is interesting:

• We teach in rooms of about 30 students that have very different worldviews and ways of learning
• We should be teaching 21st century skills -- it is no longer about just knowledge transfer (was it ever?)
• We are expected to teach more students, more things, with less money (this is the educaitonal equivalent to walking uphill both ways through snow)
• Education is traditionally a market that is evolutionary, not revolutionary

So, what is the future of education?

Teaching Discourse within Disagreement - A Quora-inspired blogpost

I am an occasional Quora user. I love the concept of answering a question as fully and accurately as possible and having it crowdsourced for accuracy.It is the next extension of Wikipedia. I also feel guilty that I really only feel qualified to answer questions about Batman, BYOT, and an occasional entry on some aspect of #digcit.


So when is saw this question come across my screen:
How can Obamacare be explained in layman's terms?


I was determined to take a crack at it. I sat down to write and opened up a few screens to fact check and when I was finished, I realized that I had not come even close to answering the question. So I never posted.


This was the first paragraph of what i wrote:

Wow. This might be one of the most challenging questions I have seen recently. Urban Dictionary describes "Layman's Terms" as an attempt to "describe a complex or technical issue using words and terms that the average individual can understand" -- I would add to that dictionary that most people who ask the question are seeking "just the facts" without a particular bias or slant, since they often are looking to draw their own conclusions. And even the term "Obamacare" was, and to many still is, a pejorative term for the Affordable Care Act that was meant to imply, among other things, a) that it was one person's idea and  b) a big brother-esque totalitarian solutions (remember the "death boards"?). 

So I scrapped my attempt to answer the question. But that started one of those thought spirals that brought me back to my "Teach the Controversy" series (Part I, Part II, and the PLN-based Part III). This was made even more poignant by Sunday's Mass and the subsequent discussions that happened (I'll get to that part in a second).


Interlude - A Peek Behind the Curtain
I remember one of the more frustrating moments of my Senior year was receiving an assignment to write a research paper. Attached to the assignment description was a list of verboten topics such as abortion, the death penalty, and passing out condoms in school. There were the usual grumbles but the teacher was adamant that these topics had been written about to death. 


A year later, I had the opportunity to do one of my first observations in teacher-training at that high school. During this one week intensive, I got to look behind the curtain into the mysterious teacher's lounge. In classic fly-on-the-wall mode, I got to hear about a variety of things. I remember my shock that teachers knew exactly what was going on in the back of the debate bus (yikes!) as well as who-was-dating-whom and other top-secret teenage lore.


During one of these discussions, the topic of the research paper topics came up. I listened as I heard teachers extol the policy of limiting topics that would cause the student's to lose focus on correct structure, cause arguments that would never be settled, and force teacher's to tip their hand to their own opinions. Through the conversation, it became clear that for all but a few of the oldest teachers, these topics had not been written about "to death" in class -- they had not been written about at all for years!
End Interlude 


I think that we are beginning to reap the results of this policy...and as educators, I think it falls to us to begin to fix the problem -- one controversy at a time.

Fortnight of Freedom:
A Real World "Teach the Controversy" Application

If you are not Catholic, you may not be aware that we are currently in the middle of a celebration, a movement, a protest called the Fortnight for Freedom. This is the name of a series of articles, speeches, homilies, etc. in protest over the Combination of the Affordable Care Act's demand for insurance coverage of certain routine/preventative/health promoting services and an HHS sub-committee's determination that one of those services in the area of women's health should be contraception. You can read the Kaiser Family Foundation's summary here. Note I did not say its unbiased description -- that is kind of the point I am going to try to make -- While I think the summary is accurate and accounts for arguments on both sides of a controversial topic, that is no longer the measure of "unbiased" in American discourse.


Unbiased, has taken an Orwellian shift to mean its opposite. In order to be considered "unbiased" you must now present information from the political, religious or other perspective of the reader.


I sat in church and listened to the homily of my friend and Priest as he explained that this was not an issue of contraception but was an issue of Religious Freedom. More importantly, it was an issue of religious discrimination, since insular churches (predominantly ministering, educating, helping) people of a single faith could be exempt but churches with outreach (read Catholic schools, Catholic hospitals, among others) could not be exempt. -- In a moment i have since come to regret, I walked out.

• I sat on the steps of the parish with my Transformer Prime and began reading the letter from the Bishop that the priest had been quoting -- it outlined the case for religious discrimination. 
• I went back and read the reaction from Church leader's when the coverage was first announced -- very little about Religious Freedom in that context. The concern then was that Church dollars (in the form of payments to insurers) would be used to fund contraception that is against the tenets of that faith -- good point, thought I. 
• Reading further, I found that there had been a compromise made that would force the insurance companies in these situations to cover the full cost of contraception without payment from the Church or the individual being a factored into the cost model.
• I went back to the Bishop's letter written weeks after this compromise. It clearly talked about the church being forced to "fund and facilitate" contraception. No mention of the policy change. The language was now much more nuanced with the vague "facilitate" taking on strange, non-layman meanings and the term "funding" being applied only under that  "if-we-pay-for-thing-A-then-there-will-be-money-for-someone-else-to-pay-for-thing-B" kind of way.

This was a lot more complicated than the homily made it out to be. The homily was a call to arms, complete with a concluding litany-of-saints invoking images of people being forced to say prayers in homes with darkened curtains and underground Eucharist.

My wife, an OBGYN and much better writer than I am, wrote a letter outlining her reaction to the priest and he asked if we could have dinner. After a wonderful evening with chatting, fellowship, and a good meal, we sat down to discuss.

Let me repeat that last line, it's important: We sat down to discuss.

• We outlined points of view. 
• We repeated what each other said to be sure that we understood it. 
• We spoke with passion about our feelings, but not dismissive of the passionate feelings of others. At one point, my wife was reading the language of the final rule, the priest was reading documents from the Bishops at USCCB.org, and the Google TV, was showing the news articles during the shift in tone from the funding-issue to the religious-freedom issue.

We identified areas of common ground and areas of further discussion. We talked about actions that could be taken to address the larger issue of a corruption of human sexuality. We learned from each other.

In a broader context, we talked about the polarization of politics, religion and society in general. We talked about confirmation bias and echo-chambers, where we dismiss that with which we do not immediately because there are always hundreds of sources that confirm our belief, so how could we be wrong? We talked about raising a generation of children without the ability to see past their own perspective.

Reflection

As educators, we have to embrace the opportunities for controversy. In those moments and those topics lie the opportunity to teach the fundamentals of discourse and persuasion. To teach how to dissect the biases of our own perspective and work with people from differing points of view on finding common ground. 

Gary Stager, at #ISTE12, chastised educators who force students to "make presentations on topics they don't care about to audiences that don't actually exist". We need to listen to this truth. Teach the controversy...better yet, let the students teach the controversy while we guide them on the fundamentals of finding accurate information, deconstructing claims and identifying evidence and flaws in logic, and building consensus with people who did not already agree with us.

Will this increase standardized test scores? Probably, but that's not why we should do it.

• We should do this because it is too easy today to live in an info-laden world where everyone agrees with you.
• We should do this because students need a place and an environment in which they can learn to ask questions, disagree, and change the minds of other while being open to having their own opinion change
• We should do this because it might be the most important 21st century skill.

Let's stop having students write about "safe" topics they don't care about. Let's stop hiding behind a bland vernier of unbiased objectivity that no student believes anyway. 

We have a month left until school begins...let's start changing the world.

On Impromptu Speaking and Digital Citizenship: Thoughts from the National Debate Tournament

Today is Thursday, June 14, 2012. More importantly, today is the Thursday of the National Forensic League Championships, or as I affectionately call it, Impromptu Day.

For those of you who have never been to a High School Speech and Debate tournament, I want to take a few minutes to paint a picture, because it is what is best about education on a number of levels. Students who are passionate about learning, competition, performance and excellence are competing in intellectual, communicative, and critical thinking activities through their own choice, guided by passionate teachers and educators.  They are also generally dressed really nice and on their best behavior which is also cool.

Students wait for postings of the semi-final speech competition

The national tournament is the culmination of this activity, gathering over three thousand of the best speakers, debaters, and performers from around the nation. To compete at this level you must qualify through local competitions and the quality shows. Over the course of three days students compete in ten main events, gradually narrowing the field from hundreds, to sixty, to 12, to 6, to the national champion.

On Thursday of nationals week, about a thousand of the speakers and debaters who have been eliminated from main events gather in a single room for the Impromptu speaking competition. These students have a variety of skill sets: excellent speakers, critical analyzers, extemporaneous responses. Each of these skills play a part as 3/5 of the competitors are eliminated each round throughout the day. The competition is intense and the stress level resembles a marathon as students are given five minutes to prepare a five minute speech on a choice of three topics and then wait to find out if they survive to compete in the next round. Sometime late Thursday evening, the final six competitors are sent home to prepare for a final round of competition and the crowning of a new national champion.

It is amazing.

As I drove into the competition this morning I was reviewing the last minute advice to give my six students entering this fray:

• Speak slowly and give yourself time to think of your next sentence
• Play to your strengths, debaters are analyzers -- don't try to out-smoothtalk a person who gives prepared speeches every weekend.
• Find a structure: Thesis supported by two independent  points works well. Examples should support the points, not the thesis directly. Don't speak a string of examples. It's not good in life and not good in competition.

As I constructed the final piece of advice in my head regarding introductions (quality quotations, striking statistics, alliterative anecdotes), I was struck by a disconnect that applies to Impromptu speaking, Extemporaneous speaking (30 minutes of researched preparation), debate events -- the lack of Internet.

Interlude: 
I am often asked to draw on my forensic experience to be give impromptu speeches about technology, digital citizenship, a pre-dinner invocation, etc. It is not atypical for me to reach into my pocket and grab a phone to look up a quick statistic, remind myself of the exact wording of a quotation that stuck in my head, or find something pithy from a Jesuit. In the same way that technology has made memorization of quick-reference facts unnecessary in many circumstances, the internet has done away with the traditional quotebook, almanacs, etc. -- Except in competitive speech.
[end interlude]

While computer use has been growing in competitive forensics at all levels (taking notes, storing/retrieving local information, reading speeches), there is a ban on connectivity in all competitive events and only explicit acceptance of any computer use in debate and one type of speech.

On Vivid Descriptions and Big Tents: Breaking Down the Claim for Fewer Teachers

An analysis of the most recent attack on teachers -- that there are just too many of them.


for those of you who have watched the new Jen and JD Show or followed the blog/twitter, you'll know that a recurring theme in my thought process is my slightly shocked reaction to the attack on teachers in recent years. Given that teachers are not a strong political group, that the unions in general have lost their power, and that ready-made scapegoats are much easier to attack than issues like poverty or cycles of illiteracy, it should not be surprising that sound-byte culture has taken the stance that teachers are to blame. It is slightly more frustrating that both big-tent political parties have taken this position to some extent by placing faith in high-stakes tests and business-centered competition rhetoric, but we are past the stage where we can look to any political party to speak out in the name of educators.


So it falls to educators to call "foul" and get the word out.


This is not going to be an easy task. The news is not going to cover it. The sunday morning talk shows don't have a place for an educator's voice (although they seem to always have seats for multimillionare businessmen), and the most powerful bully pulpits are reserved for talks about "filling in ovals completely and dark" as the pathway to educational heights of performance ecstasy.


So let's take the arguments one at a time. Blog, write, advocate through social media, and begin to change the conversation around at the grass roots level. Because, and this may be important: teachers, as a group, know how to educate children. We know what works and what doesn't. We know how to fix problems that happen. We know what bad teaching looks like and, in general, call it out to administrators.


We care about our students. We care about them even when they frustrate us. We care about learning. We care about it in spite of all of the barricades that the Federal and State governments and their puppet masters the book publishers and large corporations put in our way. 


On Fewer Teachers -- The Premise


The latest attack that is gaining traction in the political discourse claims that we need fewer teachers. The claim seems to be taking a few different forms and is based on the generalizing "well everyone know that..." down-home rhetoric that appeals to people who will only consider a sound-byte and not dig deeper. Eventually we need to come up with a good counter-soundbyte, but until that time, I want to pick apart the argument a little.


New Hampshire Governor, John Sununu, seems to be one of the many voices spearheading this argumentation. The mass appeal whips up fervor over smaller government, fewer public employees, etc. Naturally, since many teachers are public employees, they fall into this group. What is astounding is the reasoning behind it:

There are municipalities, there are states where there is flight of population. And as the population goes down, you need fewer teachers...If there’s fewer kids in the classrooms, the taxpayers really do want to hear there will be fewer teachers. [...] You have a lot of places where that is happening. You have a very mobile country now where things are changing. You have cities in this country in which the school population peaked ten, 15 years ago. And, yet the number of teachers that may have maintained has not changed. I think this is a real issue. And people ought to stop jumping on it as a gaffe and understand there’s wisdom in the comment.

ThinkProgress has the full article and includes video for those of you skittish about the bias of a liberal news source (of course, if you fall into that category, you have probably already stopped reading, which is part of the confirmation-bias issues that we need to address in our #digcit classes with the next generation).

 So, let's break down the Sununu quote, acknowledging that he may have deeper analysis that did not come out in this interview, but holding him accountable as a taxpayer making public statements to a wide audience:

Population is going down: His first argument is one of simple arithmetic. If we need X number of teacher per Y number of students. When the number of students goes down, the number of teachers should go down. -- Its so simple that absolutely no one could disagree, right? There are a few problems with the premise of the claim though:

Attempting to Teach Digital Citizens about PLNs, Teaching the (non)Controversy part III

This was originally going to be a blog about how kids communicate based on my reflections of the last two weeks of the #BYOTchat (Thursdays 9pm...where all the cool educators hangout).

I was going to talk about the increase in students using twitter over facebook. How a huge factor in this seems to be the adoption of facebook by the students' parents. This was going to branch into a decision making matrix about distinguishing when we are trying to reach out to kids (in which case, be where they are) from when we are teaching kids to be attentive to their communications responsibilities (in which case, set the expectation and don't coddle). I would have concluded with some tangent about developing social media policies for schools that respects the privacy of teachers but encourages interaction with students.

This will not be that blog. Instead...

Teaching the (non)Controversy, Revisited

Note: this is part three, but can be read without the other two. Of course, if you want the whole picture...

In part one of Teaching the Controversy, I discussed the big picture idea of how our modern system with infowhelm and a dissolution of the forces that shape the Marketplace of Ideas is making it more difficult to determine truth and accurate information.

In part two, we analyzed how this impacts today's students and how creating assignments which embrace controversy might help us build the tools of critical analysis and discernment in students that a) they lack and b) desperately need.

I thought that would probably be the end of the discussion (for the time being).

[Interlude One]

One of the assignments I give in the last month of the #digcit class is a weekly analysis of a technology article. This analysis serves two functions: first, it allows students some exposure to current trends in technology that interests them. Second, students are challenged to identify a claim made by the article and analyze the evidence (or lack thereof) given to prove the claim.

.02% is really small

One of my students chose Twitter's response to the leaked twitter passwords picked up by a number of news agencies last week. In his summary, he challenged the claim that "it was not a big deal" because out of 60,000 leaked passwords, 20,000 were duplicates. He pointed out that twitter was concerned with 20-30,000 accounts when they should actually be worried about 40,000.

In the class discussion, we were able to use this example to point out a few things:

1. The source article that was cited was not very well written. It skipped a lot of information from the original Twitter talking points. (note: you would only know this if you did some digging).
2. In terms of significance, the difference between 20,000 accounts and 60,000 accounts when there are 140 million active users, is probably not enough to sway an opinion change one way or another.

At that point, another student asked why I was critical of the information from the article...enough so that I went digging for the full statement. The answer, surprised even me: "They [the writers on that particular site] are not the best journalists -- I only use that site for product reviews...so i just assumed something was off"

[End Interlude]

Think of these levels of information analysis nuance that have to be taught to understand this:

• Don't believe everything you read at face value -
  We teach that. Check
• Even if that source is credible by every measure you have been taught -
  Check? (said with hesitation)
• Understand that an expert in one sub-section of a topic might not be an expert in another -
  hmm. we don't teach that as much
• Evaluate all the facts from multiple sources from different points of view to determine the significance of the problem -- go beyond just the ability to explain the situation -
  That is getting really nit-picky. These are freshman. There are only so many hours in the day...

The New Authoritative Source: Personal Learning Network

At this point, I went into full-on Jesuit educator mode and asked the students to put away their phones and do some reflection (this is common practice, so they did it with a minimum amount of eye-rolling):

• What are the three sources of information that you rely on most?
• What are the next 5 sources of information that you use? (can you name eight sources of trusted information? my students struggled)
• What are the distinguishing characteristics that makes you put something or someone in your top 3, not your next 5?

After a few minutes we began to discuss. Some quick hit answers:
"I don't think that I have that many"
"I don't know why I trust them. I just do"
"I think it is because they say some things that I already know is true, so I believe other things"
"I like them"

At this juncture, I gave them the term "Personal Learning Network". For the purposes of the discussion, I am thinking of a PLN as any source that you believe prima facie (at first glance) unless proven otherwise -- A trusted person, agency, source.

One student volunteered to be our class case study. He explained that his most trusted source was trusted in large part because he felt they spoke about things that he felt strongly were true (similar worldview). He contrasted it with other competing sources that he felt were very biased. When pressed, he acknowledged that this bias was not scientifically determined, but a general feeling of unfairness that was confirmed by others.

If our most trusted sources are chosen in part, because they reinforce the ideas that we already have and we are likely to suspect data that comes from a source outside of our PLN, particularly if they have a different worldview, then how hard is it to change our minds about something we feel strongly about?

"It would be very difficult", our case-study student responded.
"They will just keep telling you things you want to hear."
"It would be impossible. How could you do it at all?"

It's Baaaack...

[Interlude Two]

Student 1: Is that why there are still people who believe the Earth is flat?

Teacher: Can your prove otherwise? I can only think of one way and I don't have an eclipse handy.

Student 2: It's what we were taught. There is something about the Coriolis effect.

Student 3: Well, most of us know it because we learned it in school. So teachers are part of our PLN?

Student 4: Do all teachers have to be a part of your PLN? As a group? Or do we pick and choose?

[End Interlude]

Human Development, Learning Networks, and Infowhelm

If you have read the previous two posts, I won't bore you by going into details. We had a robust discussion about how we live in a world that is set up to force their to be two sides to everything, even when it is really unnecessary, and how that becomes the source of fact for particular worldviews. From there:

The thoughts and feelings that help shape our
PLN may happen when we are very young

• We talked about how the sources we choose to trust come from thoughts and feelings that may be developed before we even know what research or bias is.
• We talked about distinguishing fact from opinion.
• We talked some more about distorting facts and pseudo-controversies.
• We talked about how most of the facts we know come to us second or third hand, from school, from our PLN, from Wikipedia.
• We talked about how boring and difficult Peer-Reviewed journals are to read, even if you can access them.

...and then the bell rang.

One of my students stalled as the others shuffled out the room, more thoughtful than usual on a Friday afternoon. "So what is the answer? How do we solve this problem?"

• I thought the answer could have something to do with an awareness of self - how we filter information and the blinders that we put on as part of human nature's way of dealing with the chaos of input.
• I thought the answer might lie partly in making the conscious choice to include people in our PLN whom we respected but with whom we often disagreed.
• I thought the answer definitely entailed developing new skills that included critical reading and rapid/regular crosschecking of facts.

"I don't know," I said, "but I think the topic is an important one, particularly as more and more information is thrown at you on a daily basis.

"You should teach this to the class next year"

Indeed. We all should.