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.

 

barcamping on plymouth rock

Mine eyes have been opened to the glories of disruptive innovation. I think I’m finally starting to get it, thanks to Scott McLeod.

I was lucky enough to have a seat in the room Thursday as Scott presented to a group of Minnesota administrators on the whole prickly, sticky ball of 21st century challenges facing school leaders. (One of the slides in Scott’s presentation shows a blindfolded CEO-type; the text reads, “The people in charge of leading school organizations into the 21st century often are the least knowledgeable about the 21st century.” Pretty blunt message to deliver to a group of school CEOs, but no discernable ripples or gasps in response. Guess they were too busy listening.) Later in the session, Scott reprised his K-12 Online Conference presentation on Clayton Christensen’s notion of disruptive innovation and its implications for school leaders.

My understanding of disruptive innovation before yesterday was pretty pedestrian: new technologies or paradigms come along periodically, shake everything up, and displace the old. The cassette tape replaced the vinyl record, and was in turn replaced by the CD, which is now being replaced by the iPod. Everything new is old again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

THE CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT MODEL PROBLEM

What I’d missed all along is the part about how organizations manage, or are overtaken by, the changes. It ain’t pretty. Call it the Continuous Improvement Model Problem. Organizations are designed to serve their present circumstances, not an unknowable future, and will tend to continue along those lines, doggedly pursuing incremental improvement, striving to fit ever-more-snugly into their chosen niche, unless and until…disrupted. Most organizations are full of capable, well-intentioned, passionate people doing a bang-up job of serving constituents, clients, or students in fulfillment of their stated mission—which does not usually include trying to remake the organization into something it’s not. When the disruption occurs, it’s usually too late to turn the Titanic, and down we go, deck chairs, string quartets, and all. It’s tough for currently successful organizations to stay ahead of disruptive changes even if they see them coming; they’re tempted to try to keep both balls in the air, to try to serve the current mission while moving incrementally toward the new. Or, if the innovation has already arrived, to try retrofitting old systems to navigate new conditions. What’s really called for is a separatist approach. Establish autonomous colonies in unknown territories based on new, untried principles, let them compete directly with your current organization, and the ones that survive are the future of your organization. Correction: The ones that survive will become your organization. The “natural laws” of disruptive innovation suggest that retrofitting is a fool’s errand—all it does is prolong the agony. It’s a harsh, red-in-tooth-and-claw message, but an important one for school leaders to absorb.

THE END OF PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AS WE KNOW IT

Scott says that the disruptive innovation facing traditional schools is personalized learning, as represented by the growth of charter schools, alternative schools, and online coursework. You could extend that assertion into the realm of teachers’ professional learning: personal learning networks are emerging as a disruption to professional development as we know it. Those of us who are part of a PLN understand the innovation happening here—the incredible value of informal, networked, collaborative learning—and many have tried to spread the word. PLNs haven’t hit the mainstream yet. They’re still below what Scott calls the good enough line for any number of reasons: the learning isn’t credentialed, the research is pending, the numbers haven’t reached a tipping point. Some, like Kevin Jarrett, have come up with great ideas for bringing the global lessons of PLNs home to a local face-to-face network of colleagues, bridging the two worlds, and put them into action, open-participation barcamp-style.

MOVE OVER, MILES STANDISH

Evangelizing about the value of PLNs strikes me, for the first time, as a brave attempt at retrofitting. In trying to spread the word, encourage integration of elements of PLN development into existing professional development models, and grow toward a critical mass, are we still trying to serve the current system? Are our attempts to persuade (and charm, seduce, coax, coerce, bribe, etc.) others to change their practice ultimately aimed at effecting systemic change? Maybe, maybe not. Change is good on an individual level. But it occurs to me that we need to ask hard questions about what we hope to accomplish at the macro level, what changes we want to see, where we want to put our energy—sustain the old world, or . The idea is forming in my head that, if PLNs are a disruptive innovation, there’s no looking back, no sense spending energy trying to retrofit into the old system. Deep participation in a PLN becomes a radical, subversive, separatist activity, like the Pilgrims setting sail for Virginia…er….Plymouth. With every blog post, with every tweet, each of us is writing and rewriting a kind of Mayflower Compact for a new world.

Steve Dembo was only half-joking when he suggested that participating in a PLN is like unplugging from the Matrix; once your eyes are opened, you can’t go back. Like it or not, you’re a separatist, a personal learning network Pilgrim. Where are new colonies being established, and what will they look like?

[I know, I know: This post leans way too heavily on a metaphor freighted with Euro-centric, colonial-imperialist baggage. Counterpoint: Remember what Malcolm X said about Plymouth Rock and where it landed.]

 

don’t mind the mess. make yourself at home.

When we arrive, sons and daughters

We’ll build our homes on the water

We’ll build our walls of aluminum

We’ll fill our mouths with cinnamon, now.

The Decemberists, “Sons and Daughters”

We have arrived, Higher Edisons and daughters. Come in and make yourself at home. Let me take your coat. Um, I’ll just drape it over this loveseat. Sorry about the mess. But it’s a nice, airy space, don’t you think? Lots of light and room to move around. I’m still unpacking boxes and moving furniture. I don’t even have a blogroll set up yet—but based on some sensible minimalist thoughts from Chris Watson, I might just skip it. Watch out for the cat. Can I get you something to drink? No? Just here to talk, then?

I recently moved Higher Edison here from its former digs. When a business moves to new location, it’s always classy when they paint-scrawl the new address (“We’ve moved to 325 Industry Boulevard!”) on papered-over storefront windows. My version of that redirect scrawl:

After a too-long, unplanned sabbatical from writing, a period happily packed with parenting and other worthwhile distractions, I’m gingerly easing back into it. I hope. Meanwhile, much has changed. You can say that again.

In the spirit of the new year, fresh beginnings, balance and all that jazz, I’ve decided it’s time to wrap up the blue period in Higher Edison’s evolution. I’m pulling up stakes and moving the whole ramshackle prairie schooner over to WordPress. A herd of reluctant, mooing, tiny-hooved beasts are tethered to the main wagon; I expect they’ll be dragged along on the migration.

If you’ve harbored Higher Edison in your reader, this post’s weak ping may arrive like a signal from a crippled spacecraft drifting at the edge of the solar system. A romantic, alluringly tragic theory. Truth is, this beater has been just down the street the whole time, up on blocks in a musty U-Store-It storage unit. That strange sound you hear? Me rolling up my sleeves.

Last time around, the walls were simultaneously over- and under-engineered: something like titanium covered with rec-room paneling. I’m going to be striving for a simpler, aluminum-walled construction in my writing this time—posts with a generous crumple zone to ensure reader and author safety in the event of a crash. Trying to hit it out of the park every time eventually means not showing up to the ballpark at all. Singles are fine. And bring on the cinnamon. Definitely more cinnamon. The former tagline mentioned being on the lookout for “bright ideas in education and technology,” but that doesn’t really cut it any more. Too general, too generic, too vanilla, too suggestive of dispassionate reportage, and it didn’t say a thing about what should be done with all those bright ideas. And it started to seem like a lie, or at the very least like an honest inaccuracy that would eventually graduate to being an out-and-out falsehood if it went uncorrected long enough, as I found myself writing less about specific technologies than about Web 2.0 as a phenomenon of communication, learning, expression, culture, and flying spaghetti monster of buzzing pop-philosophy; less about education as a manifestation of pedagogy and policy than about the intellectual and creative strands of the lives of the (mostly) K-12 teachers who were blogging about it all, and the glimpses they’ve provided of what it all means for their students. In reality, of course, I ended up mostly writing about my own learning. Doesn’t everyone?

The new tagline space will remain blank for now. In keeping with the name of this blog, I may actually step away from well-trodden K-12 ground occasionally and try to write about higher education—at least, the version of higher ed in which I currently live.

Other strains of cinnamon that may be filling mouths around here soon:  exploration of George Siemens‘ notion of the limitless university and higher ed’s role in professional development for teachers; PLNs; unintended uses of technology that are creative, subversive, disruptive, expressive, expansive, and innovative; weakness for good writing of all kinds, wherever, however, and whenever it shows its murderous, gorgeous little head; cynicism and satire; sweetness and light; educational thought and talk translated into action.

 

laboring for invention

If there be nothing new, but that which is

Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,

Which, laboring for invention, bear amiss

The second burden of a former child!

–Shakespeare’s Sonnet 59

Ben Grey asked some critical questions recently about 21st century literacy. What are we really saying when we toss around that handy phrase in mixed company?  Does it mean anything? Ben wonders if it’s all just an exercise in semantics, and worries that too much imprecise talk about skills, new literacies, and proficiencies is muddying the water. He argues that the 21st century skills/literacy concept is an emperor with no clothes, and that behind the label are familiar literacy tenets: reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing. Is there nothing new under the sun? Ben’s question has spawned some excellent discussion here, here, and here.

Ben:

If we’re talking about literacy, let’s talk about literacy, as in reading, writing, speaking, and listening.  If we’re talking about other skills that people need to be successful in the modern era, then we’re probably talking about skills rather than literacies.  If we’re being specific about these skills applying uniquely to the 21st century, we should probably call them such.  Although, are there really any skills that are being called 21st Century Skills that are new in the 21st century?  Think about it.  The Partnership for 21st Century Skills believes demonstrating originality, communicating, being open and responsive, acting on creative ideas, utilizing time efficiently, accessing information, etc. are all 21st Century Skills.  I’d retort that in reality, these skills have always been in existence and of the utmost importance.  They don’t need to have the 21st Century moniker on them to make them significant.

And I think that’s the heart of the issue for me.  The whole idea of qualifying all of these skills, or even literacies if you want to adopt a broader sense of the term beyond the traditional, with 21st Century confuses what the real focus should be.

I’m not so sure this is just a semantic debate, or a matter of parsing definitions of literacies vs. skills. Nor do I completely agree that what’s happening is just repackaging of existing concepts. My comments on Ben’s follow-up post:

While I’m heartened to see our familiar friends The 4 Pillars (read, write, speak, listen) out front, loud and proud, and I agree that they’re fundamental, it feels like something’s missing. You deserve kudos for critically raising the possibility that the 21st century skills/literacies moniker is slapping a new label on an old concept, and for worrying about the consequences re credibility. But I think there IS something new going on here that goes beyond the Big 4, or at least beyond our traditional understanding of them as the cardinal literacy compass points, and it’s worth our attention.

Some really-really half-baked attempts to extend what I mean:

SYNTHESES & INTERSTICES: Our traditional sense of reading/writing/speaking/listening (at least, of teaching them) tends to isolate them, focusing on each as if it’s a monolithic, stand-alone competency. You read. Tomorrow you write. Next month, during the speech unit, you speak. Might 21st c. literacy be about how they interact and combine and synthesize? About what happens in the spaces between the monoliths, or in the student whose engagement shifts quickly between them, and whose role (reader/writer/speaker/listener) shifts as quickly? I agree with the basic premises of your VT example—it’s useless without core literacy, and it’ll give way to something new before we know it. But I think it’s a good, current example of a “new literacy” experience in the way that it juxtaposes the Big 4, and allows (demands, almost) engagement with all four at once. And, more to the point, it demands attention to their interrelationships and intercontextuality. How, for instance, my thinking about a VT artifact organically changes from first viewing to second as a result of listening to a comment, or how my understanding of a comment changes as a result of composing my own comment. Is it enough to be just readers or writers in isolation? We need to be readers-who-are-also-writers, writers-who-are-also-viewers, and so on. Roles morph and morph again in a recursive process, you can never quite pin down whether you’re a particle or a wave, and suddenly we’re not in Kansas anymore. Writing a blog post may involve all the traditional competencies of writing an essay, but the simple act of linking out to another blog weaves together the reader and writer roles so intimately that we have to treat it as something different.

CONTEXT AND COLLABORATION: That said, I think the changes even go beyond role. Clay mentioned identity management and social reading as possible aspects of 21st c literacy. Instead of the simple person-to-text (text being broadly defined here) relationship I grew up with, where we often raised that silly question about “author’s intent,” students are now faced with a more complex, multimodal scenario. They may be relating to the text, but a link or two later and they very well might find themselves in a relationship with the author, too, not to mention a whole rotating cast of other readers and writers also interested in the same conversation. Communication and expression are no longer a one-off deal, but merge into a larger, possibly-permanent cloud. Mediating and managing your online identity become part of being able to effectively communicate. Being aware of your surroundings and context and audience become very important. It’s a variant of the tree-falls-and-no-one-is-there-to-hear question: If a tree wants to be heard, how and where should it fall to be sure it makes a glorious cacophony? Or if it doesn’t want to make a sound, can it find a place to fall where no one will be listening?

The counterpoint to “laboring for invention” is that necessity prompts invention. We and our students are faced with compelling necessities that truly are new and different. 21st century literacy as response to disruptive innovation, anyone?

Will Richardson has convened a far-ranging Elluminate discussion on this question that’s happening right now. Notes from the session can be found here.

 

leaning into the kernel: relational trust in PLNs

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

Justice Potter Stewart on definining obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964)

“While I am still having trouble defining exactly what this is, I know that what I observe to be my PLN has dramatically changed the way I view teaching, communities, and the negotiation and formation of knowledge.”

Alec Couros on defining personal learning networks

Alec Couros didn’t invoke the Potter Stewart clause in his recent attempt to discover a definition of personal learning networks, but he could have. Alec put the question “What is a PLN?” to his Twitter network in what, he noted, was an inherently existential exercise. But a useful and enlightening one. While a satisfactory definition is still lurking out there on the margins, Alec’s network kicked back some robust 140-character building blocks for starters, like these:

From @BlancheMaynard: “PLN is organic; PLE is mechanic. You can use ‘tools’ like Twitter within your PLE to access your network, but the tool isn’t the network.”

And from @jrichardson30: “To act as a source AND catalyst for this sort of thought-provoking conversation and authentic experience mentioned above that leads us to a point where are required to engage, to reflect, and ultimately to contribute instead of just consuming.”

We know a PLN when we see one. More importantly, we know when we’re in—and being changed by—one. And while we may struggle to find referents and research to support what we’ve learned through our experience,  we know what we know deeply and intuitively. As Alec says, the personal change can be dramatic. This business of not quite being able to put our empirical finger on a truth,  of knowing something through direct personal experience, strikes me as being essentially mystical.  In this light, Alec’s existential exercise  starts to look more like a koan: What is the sound a PLN defining itself?

Not that there’s anything wrong with having an inner life. Parker Palmer often talks about the importance of interiority in education, but with a decided slant toward reclaiming a more pragmatic mysticism.  He talks about Barbara McClintock, the eminent, Nobel-winning geneticist, as an example of a “wheels-down” mystic; her science was rock-solid but guided by an intuitive grasp of patterns and relationships in genetic material. Her decades of research focused on corn. Asked by her biographer, Evelyn Fox Keller, to describe her leaps of insight into the complex genetic structure of corn, McClintock responded, “Somehow you have to have a feeling for the organism….To do great science, you have to learn, somehow, to lean into the kernel.”

Leaning into the kernel. That suggests intentionally knocking ourselves off-kilter and into a new stance, giving up our usual straight-up-and-down center of gravity in hopes  of discovering new slantwise perspectives. Getting closer, mingling spaces, listening beyond the noise. And, to me, the language of leaning also implies a degree of trust: trust that you’ll be caught as you begin to fall into a void. Arguably, Alec Couros was leaning into the kernel of his PLN, trusting it to buoy his understanding, and trusting that he’d recognize insights as they emerged.

Parker Palmer also frequently talks about trust as a defining factor  in the success of schools. He cites the study conducted in the 1990s by Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider of the University of Chicago, Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement.

What factors, they wondered, made the difference between schools that got better at educating children over the course of that decade—as measured by improved test scores—and schools that did not? The answer was not money, models of governance, up-to-date curricula, the latest in teaching techniques, or any other external variable. The answer was ‘relational trust’ between teachers and administrators, teachers and parents, teachers and teachers. Schools with high relational trust, and/or leaders who cared about it, had a much better chance of serving students well than schools that ranked low on those variable.

He continues:

Well, who doesn’t know that a building full of people who don’t trust each other will not do much good with all the money in the world? And who doesn’t know that a building full of people who trust each other can do great work, even with a lack of material resources? Everyone knows that, right?

Like a PLN, relational trust can be a hard notion to pin down. Palmer argues above that we know it when we see it, even if we’re not sure how to go about making it happen.

All of this kernel-leaning makes me wonder how relational trust plays out in personal learning networks. Bryk and Schneider tell us relational trust is an important factor in how effectively schools function and how well they serve students. Does the idea transfer to PLNs? Does relational trust factor into how *effectively* your network functions, and by extension, how well it serves its participants, and by further extension, your students? Obviously, a school’s goals and structure are quite different than the fluid, organic, shifting, opt-in life of a PLN. But I wonder if our PLNs can teach us lessons about building relational trust back home in our schools. 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?

For fun and edification, and to try to spark some insights a la Couros, I’ve created a brief relational trust survey based on items from Hoy and Tschannen-Moran’s Omnibus Trust Scale . It has two parts: the first addressing relational trust in your PLN, and the second deals with trust in your school/work setting. I  tweeted the link last week, and a few hardy souls have already ventured forth to take the survey—thanks, Bill and all, especially for the illuminating comments. I promised to deliver a formal summary of results ’round about now, but it’d be nice to collect a few more responses. Let’s keep it open for another week or so. Informal snapshot: suffice it to say that the numbers for relational trust in PLNs are running unsurprisingly high, and the trust-in-schools numbers are lagging behind.

If you’re game, take the survey.

 

letter to the next president

Dear Mr. President,

 

It’s no coincidence that our schools do double duty as polling places on election days. When the polls opened this morning, the line at Riverview Elementary was already 200 deep and growing, starting at the gym doors, turning the corner, and stretching far down the hall. This was a rare snapshot of my neighborhood, a sleepy still-life. The man behind me said, “I’ve been voting here for years and have never seen a line like this.” Some brought coffee in to-go cups. Some were dressed for work; others sported sweatpants and an air of soak-it-in leisure: call it Electoral Casual. As one woman laughed, “I got nothing else to do today. It’s history in the making.” A woman walked to the end of the line while texting on her phone, never once looking up, a picture of utter concentration. Election greeters with clipboards walked up and down the line verifying voter registrations. Second grade writing projects hung on the walls outside classroom doors, giant orange and yellow construction-paper pencils bearing bold pronouncements: I like to write about cats. I like to write about friends. I like to write about basketball. Look out, world! A new crop of writers and thinkers has arrived. They’re already forming and expressing opinions. Good thing, too. They’ll be voting in 2020.

 

Today’s election marks the conclusion of the greatest exercise in disjunctive thinking many of us will experience in our lifetime. The two-party electoral system boils everything down to stark either/or dichotomies: Republican or Democrat, you or your opponent, black or white, support or oppose, for us or against us. Disjunctives force our understanding of a complex, nuanced world into a kind of oversimplified, false, comforting clarity. Take a position, goes the refrain. Choose a side. Vote your conscience, your hope, your fear, your pocketbook, your whatever. Where do you stand? Taking a stand, and the giddy sense of hard-edged clarity that accompanies it, too often comes at the expense of genuine understanding. This might be a pragmatic, even necessary, way to run an election, but disjunctive thinking doesn’t serve us nearly so well in other areas of our lives. Seeing the world in black and white doesn’t make for effective public or foreign policy, either.

 

In education, we often speak of moving our teaching from a “sage on the stage” approach to a “guide on the side” model. We are not the sole givers of knowledge, and students are not empty vessels to be filled. Education is not a factory, and children are not widgets. Rather, there’s art and unpredictability and instinct and intuition in this messy, mysterious process we call learning. There’s beauty and fear, frustration, loss, and wonder. Students are human, and humans are messy. In human learning, we find the familiar black and white, but also quirkier flavors: up and down, strange and charm. We have responsibility to leave no child behind, and an equal responsibility to define “behind” in a way that recognizes and honors each child’s uniqueness. If you’re not with us, you’re. . . behind? We need a more inclusive vision of education.

 

 

We’ve had enough didacticism, enough national lecturing, enough sitting-and-getting. We’ve had enough of false disjunctives. Use your office to listen and learn, and construct public and foreign policy based on authentic understanding. Be our national guide on the side, our Learner-in-Chief. Tear down the bully pulpit, and build a classroom in its place. We’re ready to think, learn, contribute, and collaborate.

 

 

[Thanks to Scott McLeod for the tag.]

 

twitku tuesday: the sweetheart edition

Another week has zipped by, and it’s time to announce the winner of this week’s twitku contest. First, a couple of dispatches from the All-Things-Tiny Desk.

ALASITAS

In Bolivia, ’tis the season for alasitas, fairs celebrating Ekeko, a household god in charge of prosperity. Buy a miniature version of whatever your heart desires, and Ekeko will bring you the real thing during the next year. Pack up your hopes and dreams in a tiny traveling suitcase and send them out into the cosmic stream. It’s like a reverse protection racket run by a grinning, magnanimous mob boss.

I imagine an Ekeko-like mischievous imp of poetry, lounging in an old leather armchair somewhere in middle America and nodding approvingly at the scribblings of tiny poets. As shorthand, let’s say our imp’s name is Hayden Carruth. Tomorrow the imp’s name might be Bukowski; the day after that, Giovanni. We take off our shoes, empty our pockets, and send our 17-character carry-ons down the conveyor belt. In return, we hope for the the flashing gift of life-sized poetry.

ekeko/written/brief

 

TINY POETRY ILLUSTRATED

Diane Cordell has blazed another new twitku trail. In a recent post, she writes eloquently about the electrifying sign language of images. She says, "By providing images to spark connections, we can extend and deepen understanding." Diane has created a series of twitku compositions that spark connections by beautifully marrying text and images.

 

For more, see Diane’s Tiny Poems photoset on Flickr. 

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

Our new Twitku Champ is Joyce Seitzinger, a Kiwi edublogger who writes The EdTech Bach blog. Congratulations, Joyce! The winning poem:

procr/astina-/ti-on

As I rush to wrap up this post before Twitku Tuesday segues into Twitku Wednesday, I feel the rightness of Joyce’s subject matter. Joyce, pick your twitku swag from the cornucopia below.

 

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VOTE!

Vote for your favorite twitku from entries to the Sweetheart Edition. We saw some thematic creep between the romantic and political contests. But, hey, who am I to judge? What I deem political, you might call romantic. C’est la vie.  The poll will be open until Monday,
February 18; the next Twitku Champ will be announced and badged on
Tuesday, February 19. Thanks to this week’s contributors: Carolyn Foote and Aaron Strout.

<a href ="http://www.polldaddy.com" >polls</a> – <a href ="http://www.polldaddy.com/p/310409/" >Take Our Poll</a>

NEXT WEEK’S CONTEST – THE PRESIDENT’S DAY EDITION

Next week’s contest is now open; submissions accepted until 11:59pm
CST, Monday, February 18. Give us your best Lincoln or Washington poems. Give us your abbreviated Gettysburg Address: four score and seventeen characters.

You can contribute a
twitku in any of these ways:

1. Twitter: Send a tweet or direct message to @twitku575.
2. email: Send a message to sschwister[at]gmail[dot]com.
3. comment: Leave a comment on this post.
4. wiki: Add your twitku to the Twitku wiki Current Contest page.

Good luck!