#234: Generations of Edubloggers

This is my third year blogging about teaching. A profoundly cool byproduct of edublogging is that on occasion you get to be the dealer who hooks someone up with her first hit of online expression. Someone reads something you wrote and her response is visceral enough to overcome her online inhibition and comment. And she lives for awhile in various comment boxes around the blogosphere until those confines cramp her too much and she gets a Blogger or WordPress blog of her own.

I haven’t given enough thought to this but, among the blogs I read and wander past, there seems to be a generational effect at work and it freaks me out. I’m not presuming an exact genetic link, where I gave “birth” to blogs that came after mine. I’m referring to timing.

Chris Lehmann’s Practical Theory, for instance, was the first edublog I read. His blog motivated me to turn a private blog public. Jackie Ballarini was one of my earliest commenters who eventually set out to do her own thing. A year after Jackie Ballarini you had Kate Nowak, one of Jackie’s readers, now submitting fine work at f(t). A year after Kate Nowak you have Elissa Miller writing up the new teacher experience at Miss Calculate.

No doubt, all of our decisions to hang out our own shingles were motivated by more than just one graybeard blogger. I have no idea, for instance, where Ian Garrovillas, Sam Shah, and Sean Sweeney fit into in this timeline nor do I have any idea if Twitter accelerates or decelerates this process. But the general effect is clear: people take their education into their own hands which provokes other people later on to do the same thing.

It’s a process that boggles me a little bit, that makes me want to break out into song a little bit, that I recommend wholeheartedly to new teachers who now have the luxury of selecting mentors from all around the world.

Two questions:

1. Who were you reading before you started blogging? Where were you commenting? How did you get into this? I’m especially curious of people upstream like Chris Lehmann and Christian Long and that Dangerously Irrelevant guy, all of whom basically predate the Internet in my head.
2. Does this place ever seem to you like Lost island? I swear, sometimes I click around and become aware of an entire other side to this place, blogs that link to none of the blogs I read and vice versa. Bud Hunt has written this one up but he doesn’t explain how any of us ended up on this side of the island or, more importantly, what the four-toed statute means!
   

1.

Ben Blum-Smith inspires a new anti-jargon edu-slogan:

… what happens is that when kids reach a point in their mathematical education where they are asked to prove things, they find

1. that they have no idea how to accomplish what is being asked of them, and
2. that they don’t really get why they’re being asked to do it in the first place.

The way out of this is to give them a crisis. We need to give them problems where the obvious pattern is not the real pattern. What you see is not the whole story! Then, there is a reason to prove something.

Create crisis.

I have become convinced, overwhelmingly, that my value to my students as an educator is bound up less in what I know (though knowing things doesn’t hurt) than in my ability to engineer a safe, controlled crisis in their learning process (which, I think, requires knowing a whole lot about something very little).

Blum-Smith’s post connects a lot of my recent disconnected writing – in particular, my intention to be less helpful and my interest in a learning process that positions new knowledge as the solution to the limitations of old knowledge. As far as teacher mug slogans go, “create crisis” should start some good conversation in the faculty lounge.

Aside: I’m reviewing some of O’Reilly’s Head First material (for some small profit, in full disclosure) and their authors do a fantastic job creating crises. There are two chapters in the Head First Programming, in which the reader learns searching, strings, and branching. Watch how they do this:

• First, you learn how to pull down the text of a webpage for your “employer,” the CEO of Starbuzz.
• But then your employer gets sick of looking at raw HTML and you have to search strings to find the price information he’s looking for.
• But then he needs an emergency option so he can place an order if the price drops below a certain point.
• But then he needs a notification system, so your program will Tweet him that information immediately.

And so on. It’s extremely satisfying.

2.

Nina Simon, a Santa Cruz neighbor, designs participatory museum experiences which she has dubbed “Museum 2.0.” She compiled an excellent list of questions that support and suppress participation:

Here are some of the wrong questions:

1. What is the girl in the painting doing? (too teacherly)
2. What does freedom mean to you? (too abstract)
3. How would you define nanotechnology? (too impersonal)
4. What’s the best song you’ve ever heard? (avoid superlatives – they make some people anxious)
5. What do you think? (too general)

Let’s set aside the fact that she uses “teacherly” as a pejorative. The applicability of this post to anyone who spends the majority of her work day asking students questions should be obvious.

Furthermore, I haven’t set aside the puzzle I posted in You Have No Life. I’m ripping pages out of the playbooks of people who spend their working lives “engaging the imagination so that people don’t feel threatened by it”: Nina Simon (museums), Jane McGonigal (games), and David Milch (television, quoted). The projects highlighted at the Kickstarter blog (miscellaneous) are essential reading also.

3.

Robert Cringely hops on the higher-education-is-screwed meme in Burn Baby Burn [via]:

Education, which – along with health care – seems to exist in an alternate economic universe, ought to be subject to the same economic realities as anything else. We should have a marketplace for insight. Take a variety of experts (both professors and lay specialists) and make them available over the Internet by video conference. Each expert charges by the minute with those charges adjusting over time until a real market value is reached. The whole setup would run like iTunes and sessions would be recorded for later review.

I’m not in the prognostication business. I draft off more serious thinkers on the open question of the effect of the Internet on higher education. I don’t know if I’ve missed a dumptruck-sized hole in Cringely’s reasoning but I found the piece extremely provocative and I’ll be revisiting it later in this space.

4.

I want to buy a coffee table book packed with anecdotes just like this one from Ian Garrovillas, illustrating the healthy, cool interaction between a student and teacher.

I was on Good Morning America yesterday, one third of a segment called “The Art of Beating Long Lines.”

Ben Blum-Smith:

Take-home lesson: never underestimate your ability to fool yourself into believing your students understand something when really what they are doing is watching you. To force them to engage the material it is often necessary to restrict their access to you or systematically confound the signals they get from you.

I think this is a central issue for modern math teachers. We need to explicitly develop ways of question-posing and interacting with our classes and individual students that hide or disguise our intentions for how they are supposed to respond. This needs to be part of the core training of math teachers, much more than it already is.

A late link to some really great writing. Forward, retweet, reblog, subscribe, etc.

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