casey jones, junior bricoleur

 

it still insists on a path

PITCHING OUT CORRUPTS WITHIN

Edward Tufte, godfather of statistical graphics and beautiful evidence, wrote a 2005 essay in which he indicts the “cognitive style” of presentation slideware—especially PowerPoint—as weakening reasoning and analysis. PowerPoint is to critical thinking and communicating as kryptonite is to Superman. Lives don’t usually hang in the balance depending on the clarity and rigor of our argumentation and case-making presentations—but sometimes they do. Tufte’s essay is based on time with NASA as a “consultant on technical presentations for shuttle risk assessments, shuttle engineering, and deep spaceflight trajectories,” and notes on findings of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and the Return To Flight Task Group. Specifically, he analyzed PowerPoint reports prepared by Boeing for NASA decision-makers to assess the threat to a still-in-flight Columbia shuttle after the foam-debris impact was discovered.

Even while getting down to serious points, Tufte is pithy and often hilarious. His side comment about velocity:

Velocity squared is like shipping and handling: it will get you every time.

Tufte argues that PowerPoint’s slide templates, with their declarative headline-ish titles, hierarchical bulleted-outline structure, and line and space limitations, deform, skew, and limit the presenter’s message—and the presenter’s ability to think analytically and deeply when preparing the message. Tufte again (specifically critiquing the Boeing slides here, but let’s go crazy and take the liberty of generalizing his remarks) :

The rigid slide-by-slide hierarchies, indifferent to content, slice and dice the evidence into arbitrary compartments, producing an anti-narrative with choppy continuity….The format represents a common conceptual error in analytic design: information architectures mimic the hierarchical structure of large bureaucracies pitching the information. Conway’s Law again.

In other words, we tend to organize our arguments to mirror the structure, language, and culture of our organizations. And, in packaging our messages as simplified, summary “pitches” for external audiences, we run the risk of drinking our own kool-aid and forgetting the necessary technical nuance and rigor that informed the pitch in the first place. Pitching out, Tufte says, corrupts within.

AN EPIDEMIC OF BULLETS

In an apparently unrelated development, Jon Becker recently tweeted an existential yawp of frustration at the growing epidemic of bad PowerPoint. How do we feel your pain, Jon? Let us count the ways in a numbered or bulleted list. Jon’s mock public health notice about PowerPoint sparked a conversation about the constraints and affordances of presentation tools in general, and the challenge of communicating complex ideas through slides. Which led to this:

CURRICULUM AS A KIND OF INSISTING

Heavy irony acknowledgment due here, as I baldly use Jon’s point about linearity to come full circle to yesterday’s post about curriculum. His comment speaks to frustration with artificial limitations; to hopes raised for freer, more organic alternatives; and to resignation at the persistence of linear, sequential modes of thinking. I heard similar frustration about the idea of  curriculum echoed by participants in Sylvia Martinez’s tinkering session. If curriculum is a path, it insists on being followed.

Does our insistence on a path exclude other possibilities and side-paths?

How many detours will a pathwise curriculum tolerate,  and how far off-course is too far?

When is insistence a steadying hand, and when is it coercive?

 

running to stand still

At Educon 2.2 last weekend, the most unexpected, justly-poetic meta-moment was Shelly Blake-Pock’s delivery of an impromptu mini-lesson on the etymology of “curriculum” in Sylvia Martinez’s session on tinkering.

The Latin root “currere” means “to run,” and a course is a “race.” Even as the larger discussion was interrogating the need for and very idea of curriculum, Shelly pointed out how our understanding of these concepts is literally rooted in and shaped by the language we use. Curriculum as a path to be run suggests linearity, an intentional, mapped progression from starting point to end point, a channel, a route not be deviated from. Narrowness. Course as race suggests a contest: urgency, striving, speed. For the improvisers and tinkerers-at-heart in the room, it was a bracing reminder that our ideas and assumptions, even as we try to shift and remake and tinker with them, are made of ancient stuff.

But the best part was the live-action visual pun. Shelly was standing in front of this Room 208 posterboard:

This all raises the skinny specters of linearity [1] and determinism. Of tracks and ruts, of blue highways, of tangents and detours, of roads more or less (and more-or-less) traveled. Of courses run, and running to or from curriculum. Of mistakes and misdirections, deviations and course corrections, course changes and marked-up maps, sextants thrown overboard and land sighted.

Sylvia’s session was built around the notion of bricolage—playful experimentation, conversation with materials at hand, hands-on improv, fondness for the found, passion, tinkering with intent, what-have-you with what-you-have—as an alternate lens on knowledge construction. It’s remix culture in full flower, and it stands in direct counterpoint to traditional analytical problem-solving. Given generous amounts of space, time, at-hand materials, and low or no evaluation pressure, learners will figure things out and make meaning.

Is “curriculum” a restrictive construct that inhibits natural passion-based learning, a lockstep model demanding rigid adherence?

Or do the constructed boundaries of a curriculum serve as a guide-path for learning, a constraint [2] that, by focusing attention, sparks a creative response?

In other words, does curriculum keep us on track, or keep us from the constructive, creative process of getting lost?

[1] More on this later.

[2] More on this later, too, if I don’t get creatively constrained. [2a]

[2a] For example, footnotes like this one can be a creative constraint. DFW famously turned the dry lakebed of the footnote into a funhouse mirror of expansiveness.

 

page 61 revisited

Page 61, Highway 61. Electrify, electrify.

In my earlier rush to publish, I forgot to mention D’Arcy Norman’s  Page 61 Flickr pool.

Let the subversive goodness roll over you. How does it feel?

 

teaching teachers as a subversive activity

I recently discovered Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner—or, rather, it found me—thanks to Bud Hunt’s recommendation. The book’s famous hallmark is the intentional blankness of page 61. In a chapter on “What’s Worth Knowing?”, the authors invite readers to engage in inquiry-driven marking-up  by writing their own questions on page 61.about what’s worth knowing. For most people who grew up thinking of books—BOOKS!—as repositories of authoritative, received, vetted, static knowledge, as things to be handled with respect, the idea of writing in one, even when invited, feels like vandalism. Even though Postman would say the reader’s act of writing on page 61, of modifying the text and becoming a flash-collaborator, is an act of higher respect.

Page 61 is a subversive—even magical—space, a prescient glimpse ahead of its time at the read-write revolution that would come 40 or so years later.

First, it challenges our traditional, comfortable notions of book and reader by changing both into something new. By inviting alteration (you could even say requesting or demanding it), the book stops being a book in the way we usually think of it, or at least the way a 1969 reader thought of it. It stops being a static repository of received knowledge and becomes something more fluid, harder to pin down. Even the structure changes—where we expect a bunch of text, we suddenly have this space we’re not quite sure what to do with.

And second, by writing in the book, the reader changes from passive consumer to active participant and content producer. Whatever’s written on page 61 alters the meaning of the book and the next reader’s learning. Page 61 is a built-in invitation to engage in inquiry, to act, to learn and change. But in most copies, that blank page is still blank 40 years later. The subversive potential goes unexplored, and we remain stuck in our old familiar patterns.

I checked out my university library’s copy. Yep. Blank. Gotta do something to remedy that.

At roughly the same time, Alec Couros and Dean Shareski posted a “call for insights” for their Educon 2.2 presentation about the changing role of teacher education.

The topic: “(Re)Imagining Social Media and Technology in Teacher Education.”

The questions:

What are your general views on the status of teacher education in preparing teachers, especially in regards to innovative teaching? What positives, negatives, or general views can you share? Please do pull in your own experiences if applicable.

What is the ideal role of teacher education in developing teachers who are media literate and technologically savvy?

Their prompt got me thinking that Postman’s subversive Page 61 might serve as a compelling metaphor for the kinds of conversations and disruptions happening in, around, and about teacher education. Here’s my rambling attempt at a response. Don’t be distracted by the stunning production values and Clooney-esque delivery.

 

time lapse

My 15-month-old scribbled brilliantly. Now, at 26 months, he’s moved on to painting.

Time lapses, passes, and cycles around again. A new year begins. The medium is still the message. Finn has branched out into new media, and  I’m considering changes to my own scribbling medium, too—overhauls and undertakings.

Soundtrack credit: Dan Hutt Field Recordings, “Finnian Schwister and Elliot Gruber (Step Away from the Swings, Please)”

 

stephen downes thinks my 15-month-old scribbles brilliantly

2.2.09 on Flickr – Photo Sharing! via kwout

Thanks, Stephen. I agree.

We love your work, too.

 

hyper(con)text: an allusion is a link, but a link is not an allusion

Back in the dark ages when I was an undergrad, all budding English majors at my university were required to take a course called Foundations of Literature. The class was part
Cliffs Notes, part literary boot camp, and our affable drill sergeant was Laird Barber, an English professor in the classic mold: tweedy, ruddy, portly, well-traveled, and equipped with a pipe. His generous intelligence and deep-as-marrow grasp of the world’s great literatures were sometimes derailed, at least in his lectures, by…yes, you guessed it…absentmindedness.

Foundations of Lit was predicated on the simple idea that reading classic literature is a dependent-clause, networked experience. Understanding literature is only possible when the reader can navigate and make sense of mazy thickets of references to other, earlier works of literature which the work in question draws from, is based upon, satirizes, winks at, offers wry commentary about, worships, excoriates, or otherwise mentions. Works of literature don’t exist in splendid isolation; they’re built on the spines of everything written before them. Deep reading means getting the context set up by cultural, historical, and literary references embedded in the text. It means getting the inside jokes, hopefully even enough to laugh when the punchline rolls around. It means knowing that Shakespeare drew liberally from Holinshed for the history plays, based Julius Caesar on Plutarch, and used the Decameron as source material for All’s Well That Ends Well. More importantly, it means being able to glance and glide through allusions to biblical stories, Greek and Roman mythology (O Edith Hamilton, you bookish vixen!), and plots, characters, settings, and assorted story-furniture culled from thousands of years of storytelling and culture. It means having the skeleton key that unlocks literary puzzle-doors. It means reading and appreciating all of those earlier works, or at least MacGyvering together a rough understanding of their significance by taking a crash-course like Foundations of Lit. E.D. Hirsch took a stab at articulating this idea of collective “core” knowledge back in 1987 with Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and recommending a more systematic approach to teaching it; we’re all pretty familiar with the firestorm of controversy that followed and continues to smolder.

Unlike footnotes, which seek to elaborate and explicate off to the side—think of them as literature’s scenic detour (unless you’re David Foster Wallace, in which case the detour is the destination)—allusions are a kind of literary shorthand, where spartan economy of language is coupled with instant edification. An allusion evokes the whole previously-lived, previously-read package all at once. Like a memory suddenly brought to the surface (madeleine, anyone?), an allusion arrives in a rush, plops down on your lap, grabs your ears like handles, and demands attention. An allusion springs out fully armed and ready for action, like Athena popping out from Zeus’ cranium. You don’t get that from a footnote.

And you don’t get it from a link. Bud Hunt set up a sweet grammatical thought-puzzle the other day, asking whether hyperlinks might be adjectives. The jury’s still out on that one (you can still join in a lively debate on meaning, modification, and the permanence of parts of speech), but it made me wonder how the same linguistic litmus test applies to allusion. Might hyperlinks be allusions?

Allusions are like hyperlinks: They deliver a fully-absorbed story in a flash.

Hyperlinks are not like allusions: They deliver a story, but it still has to be absorbed (by reading from start to finish, by browsing, by skimming).

Allusions and hyperlinks are like each other: Their substance and meaning, and our ability to access them, may change over time. Websites change, are rewritten, disappear. Links break. Readers reread works of literature, suffer memory loss, experience life, alter their schema.

Allusions and hyperlinks are not like each other: Allusions function seamlessly within and are integral to the context of the text in which they reside; they modify without slowing you down. Hyperlinks don’t change the context until and unless you click on them, or mouse over them, or interact with them in some other way. Hyperlinks modify in the same way that a roadside historical marker does: by making you stop, get out of the car, read the thing, and maybe have lunch on that picnic table over there.

Set aside the fascinating English major wonkiness for a moment. This forking garden path leads right back to the 21st century literacies debate. One could argue (I’m not, but one could) that Google searching and the emerging semantic web render Hirsch’s idea of cultural literacy obsolete. Why do I need to know the story of Sisyphus? I can just Google it. If literary background knowledge is partly or entirely replaced by just-in-time hypercontextual linking, is a new kind of literacy at work? If so, what is it? Does it go beyond information literacy and critical reading? What do you call on-the-fly knowledge construction plugged in just in time to modify whatever you were reading in the first place?

And how do you teach it?

 

letter from camp 2.0

Lo and behold! Just as I was sinking into despair, lamenting that the Great 21st Century Literacy Debate will never reach resolution, I stumbled across this letter from camp written by a wacky kid named Sherman. Brilliant! It neatly answers all those thorny semantic questions, addresses all the unresolved issues, and wraps up the whole package with a musical bow. It’s a little blurry, but the violin part truly rocks. Time to put this debate to bed, people. You can thank me in the morning.

 

relational trust survey results

The results of my impromptu survey on relational trust in PLNs vs. school settings are in. For those of you who like your information organized in slide-by-slide chunks, a no-frills summary is embedded below and posted on Slideshare. You may, without guilt and with my blessing, jump right in and skip the rambling analysis further below.

A QUICK REVIEW

The survey was sparked by the collision of a couple of ideas: Parker Palmer’s frequent mention of Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider’s ground-breaking research on trust in schools, and Alec Couros’ recent quest to figure out what we really mean when we talk about personal learning networks. Survey items were adapted from Hoy and Tschannen-Moran’s Omnibus Trust Scale. I used Hoy for a number of reasons: 1) their scale differentiated between aspects of trust and allowed me to pull out just the items addressing trust in colleagues, 2) items were easily adaptable to the PLN context, 3) Professor Hoy generously put it out there to be used for professional and personal development, and 4) the T-scale directions page offered much needed hand-holding for a fake psychometrician like me. It was distributed to the Twitterverse a month ago and has garnered 18 responses so far. Number 18 came in after I did my first round of number-crunching, though, so for the posted results, n=17. Quick thanks here to Alec for sending most of these my way.

ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS

I was wondering:

• Is your level of trust with colleagues in your network higher or lower than with those in your school?
• Is it a different kind of trust? Is it easier to trust a school colleague who’s also a member of your network?
• What aspects of relational trust in PLNs (if any) could inform and improve relational trust-building in schools?

FINDINGS

Overall, relational trust in PLNs was rated significantly higher than in school settings. After running the numbers through the Hoy-o-Vac  (Note to self: remember to reverse values for the “suspicious of each other” item), the average score across all items for PLNs was  4.82. On the school-setting side, it was 3.41, almost a full point and a half  less. Converted to a standardized score where 500 is the mean, PLNs came in at 581 and schools at 283—over two standard deviations below the mean.

I anticipated that PLNs would rate higher for relational trust but was surprised that both sets of scores weren’t higher. Since our respondents were coming from a variety of school settings rather than from a single identified school, I expected scores on the school side to reflect a generalized average that was close to the 500 mean, with the PLN scores coming in somewhat higher. Instead, the school scores were almost rock bottom. What does it mean? You got me. It may lend support to Steve Dembo’s theory that participation in a PLN catalyzes some teachers’ decisions to leave a school, or even to leave the profession. If so, it’s not clear which is the chicken and which is the egg: Does the glimpse of greener pastures made possible by  a PLN sow seeds of discontent, or are the people who find their way into a PLN more likely  to be already frustrated with the status quo? Is a kind of selection bias at work? Cause and effect? For whatever reason, by whatever mechanism, survey respondents came through the door with a low sense of trust in their school settings.

The real learning for me came from reading through what respondents wrote in the comment section. Five distinct themes emerged from respondents’ reflections about relational trust and what they’ve found valuable in their PLN experiences: choice, equality, openness or transparency, diversity, and learning. This stuff is sheer gold, which is why  I’m quoting heavily—what they have to say is too eloquent and powerful to bury in a paraphrase.

CHOICE

The trust relationships in plns seem stronger to me because they are self selected. I can opt in or opt out of the relationship—something I can’t do in school.

You *choose* those that you invite into your PLN – and I assume you have chosen wisely. Those who are *assigned* to work in your same facility are not there by your choice. This parallels the difference between your circle of friends and your family, does it not?

EQUALITY

In a pln, everyone is equal and there is no leader.

That equality increases the trust between pln colleagues—and the inherent lack of equality in school based relationships inhibits the development of trust.

OPENNESS

The major difference I have found is related to the openness of sharing, exploring, learning/relearning and willingness to think out loud through blogs, tweets, podcasts and webcasts, sometimes at great risk professionally through my PLNs.

Funnily enough I think the people in my PLN know the ‘real me’. People in my school think they do,but in fact when it comes down to it – they don’t.  Am I more open with my PLN? Or is it because those in my PLN  are interested in/care about  the same things as I am – hence their membership in my PLN in the first place?

DIVERSITY

My PLN encompasses more diverse people/jobs/outlooks than contacts in my school district.

LEARNING

It is refreshing and energizing to be an active contributor in many professional social networks, and I learn something new every day! I couldn’t say the same about my experience in my own school/university. Over the years attitudes have become very status quo and a reluctance to by educators to consider themselves life-long learners beyond their “work hours” has been quite common. I love my PLNs!!

TO SUM UP

How did we do answering those essential questions? Pretty well with the first one, but after that it all goes haywire. The five strands of the PLN experience identified as valuable by our respondents strike me as a good place to start if you’re trying to build a high-trust organization. How readily might they transfer back into a traditional school setting? Harder to say. Another way to look at it might be to start with the people. Collect a group of people who value choice, openness, equality, diversity, and learning, and any organization they build will have a higher degree of relational trust. In other words, the question we should be asking isn’t “Can we take these lessons back to improve relational trust in schools?” but “What are the people who’ve already learned these lessons going to build?

What do you think?

Thanks again to all who responded. If you’re interested in taking a closer look at the data, or getting a copy of the survey form, contact me at sschwister at gmail dot com.