*This is a reflection post required for my JHU-ISTE Leadership program.

This post is being completed for the course “Curriculum Theory.” We have been exploring various curricular theories and programs, and this week we are to reflect on the following two questions:

* As a school administrator and instructional leader, what instructional technology would you expect to see in the written, taught, and tested curriculum of a school or school district striving to meet the needs of 21st century learners?
* What instructional technology would you promote to differentiate instruction for all learners?

The first question is certainly something I’ve discussed at length in the past. I don’t believe we should start with the technology first. I believe as a school district, we should first establish our learning goals, and then work to establish an ecology that helps us best meet our goals. I believe we’re past the point of teaching students specific technology competencies. I believe the technology is simply another option we choose to exercise when working to improve the learning experience for our students. I wrote about the way we started on this work in this post.  I still believe this is the approach to take. Establish the institution’s vision for learning, and then find the way to build the resources needed around the vision.

Developing an environment that is rife with opportunity for students to learn and extend beyond the classroom is also growing increasingly important. This discussion about the spaces in which we learn by David Jakes is a way that I see technology moving beyond the focus on tools.  The way the conversation is framed focuses entirely on how digital spaces and physical spaces merge to create an opportunity for students to engage the process of learning. In my opinion, this is the need of students today. Our mandate is to move the focus from teaching to learning, and then from the traditional means of learning to a more dynamic, individualized mode of learning that allows students to learn when and where they want outside of the classroom.

I believe creating such an environment will also provide the opportunity for students to differentiate the way they learn. By using ideas like the recorded lecture becoming the homework, we can then move the individualized transfer of learning in a classroom without taking up so much time with traditional instruction that leaves the collective intelligence of the classroom passively sitting and receiving information from a single source. Utilizing techniques like this with a combination of the physical and online environment means learning can become much more customized for students.

It is my honest belief that too often we approach technology backwards. We look at the tools, get excited, and work to shoehorn them into what is happening in the classroom. We focus more on the instruction rather than the learning. We get caught up in “Web 2.0 Whirlwinds” and “Tool Smackdowns” so that soon we misplace our focus on the tools and not what is taking place with the learning.

I absolutely believe in the power of technology-rich experiences like digital storytelling to engage literacy, wikis to engage collaboration, student-created media to engage creativity, primary sources available online to engage information fluency, and many other such technologies when they are working to engage the process of learning. When our focus is leading students on the journey of learning how to learn, and we choose technologies that help us advance that goal, that is when I think technology is the most meaningful and relevant for our schools and our students.

I have been in education for ten years, and I haven’t thought enough about that question.  I’m now in the second week of the course, “Curriculum Theory” in my JHU-ISTE program, and we’ve started wrestling with some tough questions about curriculum.

The first being the title for this post.  What is curriculum?

It seems the answer can’t be cleaved from many political influences in most cases.  That’s fascinating- that so many will battle so hard over the very definition of something I find could be rather to entirely simple.  The more I delve into the topic, the more I find myself forced to simplicity.  In my opinion, curriculum is…

All the stuff our students learn.

That’s it.  Simple.

Where it gets exponentially complicated starts with the very first step away from the definition.  Who gets to pick the stuff the students learn?  Much more difficult and political.

Some say that the curriculum we choose is broken down into three parts; the written, the taught, and the tested.  Sure that’s part of it, but curriculum is much more than that.  It’s ALL the stuff our students learn.  That means both the intended and unintended.  When we start picking exactly what the stuff is that the students will learn, we begin formulating a construct that students will engage when learning.  Obviously, there will be written curriculum that is to be taught and then tested, but there is much more to it than that.  Because it’s the bigger construct of the scope of the curriculum that will likely have the greatest impact on a student.

What I mean is, if we set up a curriculum that focuses on finite, rote recitation of facts as a major outcome, we will intend to have students complete our institution’s educational scope and sequence with a specific knowledge base we’ve predetermined.  However, what we most likely will not intend for students to learn is how to game our system.  This is happening quite often in educational institutions who most value specific, information-based learning outcomes as students figure out how to work the system, or “Do School” as Denise Clark Pope suggests, and their final proficiency may say much more about how they learned to exploit than how they learned to learn what was intended.

Things continue to grow more complicated when we take another step back and look at some of the umbrella questions surrounding curriculum and its inception.

For example, the question was posed in our class last week, “Whose values should be reflected in the content and processes of curriculum?”  That question, frankly, is kicking my tail.  I’ve thought on it quite a bit, and I still don’t have a good answer for it.  I’d like to say mine, but mine probably isn’t yours, so why do I get to decide it’s mine and not yours?  I might say the learners, but what if collectively, they decide they don’t much value education in general?  Where does that leave us?  I could take the cheap way out and say society, but who in the world can say exactly what the values of society are?  Like I said, it’s kicking my tail.

Another step back.

Look bigger than just the curriculum.  Look at schooling in general.  What exactly is the purpose of school?  I’ve written about this before, and I still believe in what I wrote in that post.  It is all about learning.  That is the purpose.  However, if learning is the goal, what is the conduit?  That, I would have to say, is democracy.

This gets us nowhere easier than previous topics.  As Deborah Meier has stated before, democracy is an incredibly difficult process to understand.  There are fewer more important revolutions in the history of mankind than the information revolution.  That knowledge and learning and information moved from the privileged few to the masses means more for the progress of citizenry than perhaps any other reform.  However, learning in a democracy means dealing with difficult issues.  The tyranny of the majority.  The repression of the minority opinion.  The absolute need for empathy.  These are not always addressed in the democratic learning institutions where our students are learning.

If we teach in a democratic institution, then what exactly should be taught?  What subjects should students learn?  Yet another question to which I don’t have the answer.  I’d like to say students should learn what is of interest to them, but that if rife with complication.  I know if I had been given the opportunity to pick that which I would learn when I was in middle school, none of the subjects would have had any academic value.  I can assure you this, though, they would have been interesting.

Should we continue on with the just in case model; giving students a bit of everything just in case they might need it some day?  Should we move to the just in time model that delivers knowledge and learning right in the time when it is needed?  Do either really offer a true solution?

I can absolutely see the need for students to learn how to communicate dynamically, and it is likely there is a certain level of mathematics and science that is needed to succeed in our world, but other than that, what should we teach?  Citizenship, vocational skill, world languages, finance?  What about specific classes in project management, collaboration (the real kind, not just cooperative learning), critical thinking, etc.?

Obviously the more I write, the less I seem to know.

One last point before I bring this rambling, stumbling wreck of a post to a close.

What about me?  What do I do that makes a difference in the lives of learners today?  That, is a very valid question.  I’m the Instructional Technology Coordinator for a K-12 district in Illinois.  I have held this position for two years now.  I’d like to say that in that time, I’ve managed to facilitate great change in the way students interface with learning through technology.  For a host of reasons, I simply can’t say that with truth.  I face the same challenges many of my colleagues face in this profession.  I try to jump many of the same hurdles.  I’ve found there are reasons why I never went out for track in school.

I do believe we can engage our students in new and emerging ways.  I also believe there’s much we can be doing to better some of the old ways.  I will not stop fighting for what I believe is best for our students.  And that is, simply, learning.  I try to ground the work I do in that bedrock.  Many days I fail.  That doesn’t mean I will give up the trying.  As long as I’m in this position, and as long as I’m affiliated with the work of educating students, I will continue to fight for their learning.

Obviously, this is some kind of fragmented post.  But these are the things I’m wrestling with.  If you have any thoughts on one, a few, or all of the topics raised, I would greatly appreciate your sage wisdom.  Or even more questions.  Those seem to be what I can handle best at present.

Thanks to kevindooley for the use of the image.

I read a great post by a student in my grad class last week that has me thinking again about the idea of a backchannel.  I wrote about this a while ago, but it seems the topic has surfaced again recently about the value of a backchannel.

The past several conferences I have attended have tried to implement a conference-wide backchannel discussion, and most have failed.  Whether due to poor wifi, poor implementation, or simply lack of interest, it seems to me the idea has started fading a bit.  I don’t know if I think that’s good or bad.

Certainly the story that surfaced this week about the backchannel gone bad at the Web 2.0 Expo is evidence of how this idea can be a complicated matter.  This spurred much discussion on Twitter, and the experience leaves many wondering what is the value in having a simultaneous chat running while a person is presenting his or her ideas.  I still believe, if done well, the chat can add a great deal for both the presenter and the conference attendees.  I really do.  However, as some have noted recently on Twitter and in other conversation spaces, it seems that often times the backchannel fails to connect to the message being presented and breaks down into a virtual cafeteria where the kids are all talking about any and all topics other than the ones being presented.

I found the post above by Michael to be most interesting.  It leaves me wondering what the role of this experience could be in the classroom.  Could it be that if we built this the right way, kids could greatly benefit from the chance of moving from passive listeners to active engagers of what is happening around them?  The idea of allowing students to backchannel during a read aloud is fascinating to me.  It takes courage for teachers to try such a thing, but if, like Michael, the end turns out to yield something of value for students, I think we should try it more.  Allow them the chance to mix their ideas with their peers in a nonconventional way to see what the recipe ends up making.

Maybe it won’t work for your students, or your teachers, or your presentation audience, but I still do believe there’s something to this idea.  It just takes some work and effort to keep the connections aligned with your learning goals, and obviously sometimes we fail at that in our endeavors to get students to invest in their learning through technology.  But if our work with technology does indeed increase student investment, then I say turn on the backchannel and see what you can hear, so to speak.

Thanks to tranchis for the use of the Flickr image.

There exists a philosophy of technology that states we should be dedicating specific time in our school day to teach students finite skills of operating computing technology.  That in order to prepare our students properly for the world, we must teach them how to word process and how to operate Power Point and how to keyboard.  The computing instruction is an end goal.  The students should learn these skills because the skills themselves are the important part of technology, and if we don’t stop throughout the day and teach them how to specifically operate the tools or applications within a computer, we will be failing to equip our future.

I’ve had discussions with individuals who say they’d rather see the students learn technology skills in isolation, and it isn’t necessary to embed or even relate this instruction to curricular content or goals.  The important part is that students learn how to operate the computer and properly work the word processing application.

I’ve found this to be a fairly popular philosophy and culture in many circles of public opinion.

So, you are in this conversation with someone.  Someone who believes adamantly that we must focus time and energy and effort on explicitly teaching students how to operate specific technology.  Someone who says we should have a checklist of computer proficiencies for each student so that we will know they can operate a computer successfully.  That if we fail to do so, we will be failing to prepare our students to succeed in the future.

And you respond by saying…

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Thanks to Flickr user wZa HK for the use of the image.

I might be wrong on this.  Feel free to posit your opinion and help me figure out what needs figuring.

There is a philosophy of technology in education that says we should afford students the chance to interact and explore specific technology experiences to ensure exposure to the technology.  Let me give you an example.

A program could be established at a school allowing all students at all grade levels in the building to engage in a short unit on digital video editing.  The unit would be done for the sake of exposing students to the process and skills of digital video editing as many of them may have cause to use those skills in a future class or occasion where they would employ the learned skills.  We also want to expose as many students as possible to the process as it may spark an inert interest and fan it into a full flame of passion for the experience, and thus, give cause for the said student to pursue a career in the field of video editing.  We also want to make sure all students in the building have the opportunity to have a common experience and exposure, so we’d make sure we work the video editing unit into a rotation outside the general classroom to ensure all students have the experience.  If we left it up to the general education teachers, it may well be that some students wouldn’t have the experience as their teachers may not be comfortable with the technology, or have the time, and thus not choose to do a digital video editing experience embedded in their class.

So the philosophy is to have all students work with digital video editing outside the general classroom to give them exposure and skills for the future.

Frankly, I don’t agree with this philosophy.  This is where I could be wrong.

I believe we should work to create both an opportunity and cause for teachers to have access to the necessary environment where they use the digital video editing as a means to engage students in embedded learning.  Allow an english teacher to dynamically engage literacy by creating a lesson that utilizes this technology.  Allow science students to demonstrate scientific principles by creating a video representation of a concept of study.  Allow foreign language students to produce a video entirely in the language they are learning.

I believe if we isolate the experience for the sake of affording the experience, we’ve made it solely about the experience and not the learning.  Yes, digital video editing is rife with opportunities for learning, but wouldn’t those opportunities be magnified when coupled with specific curricular goals?

To me, the former feels like the “just in case” model we’ve been trying to move away from for a long time.  The problem is, if we use the “just in time” of the latter, some students may well not get the experience.  But, is that a problem?  Do we think every student needs this experience?

Personally, I think we want the latter.  This is the epitome of my philosophy of technology.  My philosophy has been disagreed with as of late, and I’m wondering if I’m wrong.

Am I?

Thanks to BAMCAT for the Flickr image.

I just had a conversation that really requires quite a bit of reflection.  I’m sure I’ll write a longer, more reflective post on this in the future, but I need some feedback before then just so my head doesn’t explode.

The person I was discussing this with made two main points about things that should be established with technology guidelines.  It was a person I have an incredible amount of respect for, so this is why I’m having such a hard time with the following ideas.

1. The statement was made that all of the data being produced by teachers and students should be housed within a district.  One specific example given was that you shouldn’t allow teachers to use a site like Wikispaces as legally, a district can’t control the data, and thus can’t shut it down should teachers or students do or say something inappropriate.  Same thing for blogs, podcasts, or any other data produced by students.

2. A teacher should never allow a student’s work to be posted if it isn’t entirely free of grammatical or spelling errors.  Their work should be perfect before being shared with the public.  It would be embarrassing to a student, their family and the district if someone else saw their work that had obvious errors in it.

I have so many thoughts on this, but needed to bounce it off someone.  I thought you all would be able to give me good insights about both points.  If you were establishing guidelines for emerging technologies, what approach would you take?

Thanks to Darren Hester for the Flickr image.

Educational technology conferences are strange beasts.  Masses gather to focus and discuss technology, all the while maintaining throughout the discussions that it isn’t about technology.  It creates a rather odd juxtaposition.  I actually really like Ryan Bretag‘s statement he made a while back on Twitter that he prefers to go to content-specific conferences rather than technology conferences.  The reason that statement makes so much sense lies in the very nature of what most often transpires at a technology-specific conference.

I attended the Illinois Computer Educators’ conference a few weeks ago, and I was struck by a notable disconnect in almost every session I attended.  In almost every case, the session focused on a tool or on a specific technology devoid of any pedagogy or specific framework of how the said technology impacts a student’s learning experience.  It was quite troubling.  Many highly intelligent people were presenting tools that in essence, became sessions entirely about the tools rather than their implications.  A statement might be made at some point along the way, like, “this is really great for a math class” or perhaps, “you can see how useful this would be in a reading class.”  The problem is, that’s not pedagogy.  It’s not really much of a connection at all, to be honest.  Where’s the needed construct of what makes the technology truly transformative in the learning experience?

If a presenter took the first five minutes of a session to truly frame the discussion and base it entirely on a specific student learning skill, or set of skills, I believe the technology conference experience would be made much more powerful for attending teachers.  As it currently stands, a general classroom teacher enters a sessions, gets bludgeoned by a series of tools or applications, and then is left to leave the session dizzied and potentially disoriented as he or she attempts to draw a correlation between the dazzling tool just demonstrated and the learning experience he or she wants to afford students.  What if a presenter focused at the outset on foundational learning skills?  I don’t mean necessarily specific teaching content like math or social studies, but rather skills we know students need to be engaging in to be successful in life.  What if a presenter started off explaining the power of collaboration and communication in general terms-why those two skills are relevant and meaningful in today’s culture and built upon that foundation to frame the technology entirely within that learning context?  Discussions of pedagogy could then ensue.

For presenters, it would be like lobbing themselves up a nice softball to be hit out of the park from the very outset of the session.  If a presenter jumps out of the gate just swinging the bat, there’s zero change he or she will connect with anything outside of the occasion where the bat slips out of the hands and inadvertently strikes a nearby object.  An analogy that really does bear true in many technology sessions.  If a presenter is simply swinging that bat at the air, the only thing that can be said of him or her would be focused on the swing itself.  If the softball of learning is first lofted up, then it’s the connection that’s made that will be the focus of discussion, or perhaps the obvious lack of connection the swing of the tool makes with the ball of learning  Even if a weak connection is made and the ball is barely dribbled out of the infield, at least the discussion will be focused on where it should be, the connection that the swing makes on the ball.  It’s the whole point of why we learn to swing in the first place-to make contact with a ball and hit it as successfully as possible.

I hope more conference presenters consider this approach as they prepare for upcoming sessions.  Think about how you want your participants leaving your sessions.  Is it about the tool you are presenting or about the learning that ensues when utilizing the tool?  If everything we discussed was framed in the learning context, I believe we would serve the population of conference attendees in a much more powerful manner, and we might just find that we hit home runs with our sessions quite a bit more often.

Thanks to eschipul for the Flickr image.

*One author’s note for this post.  I began writing this prior to attending the Illinois TechCon 08 conference, and that experience resulted in a major clarification in my own thinking about this issue.  I’ll explain near the end of the post.*

Sometimes I feel like being in the Ed Tech community is a bit like being in a scene from Spinal Tap.  Specifically, this scene.

I’ve noticed this growing phenomenon of people trying to get “that extra push over the cliff” lately.  Any conference I’ve attended in the past year has been so over live streamed, live blogged, Twittered, Plurked, backchanneled, and podcast, that I’m starting to wonder if people are catching any of the content being presented.  Seriously, how multi can people possibly task?

Now let me be clear about something, I absolutely believe in the power of participation and collaboration in today’s learning climate, but I also think we need to find a bit of balance.  How about just keeping the dial right around 6?  Your voice added to the voice of the presenter can certainly bring greater understanding and depth to a conversation, and of course every conversation is made better when it is more than one person talking to a flat wall.  The problem comes when the voice of the crowd overwhelms the voice of the content.

This phenomenon isn’t restricted only to conferences.  I think it’s growing increasingly more evident in podcasts as well.  The last three podcasts I’ve listened to have had classic moments of pregnant pauses as someone reaches the conclusion of a several minute monologue where he/she spills their soul about something he/she is very passionate about, only to be met with silence.  And then a profound statement of affirmation from one of the other hosts like “right on” or “yep.”  The noise of a chat room or the lure of the web was too much temptation, and the attention of the other hosts was whisked somewhere far, far away from whatever it was their counterpart was just espousing.

I think this push to hit 11 is also an issue with emerging tools.  It seems that many people are working hard to make sure they know a tool, or even a list of 100 tools in some cases, that no one else has heard of, and they present the list as such at conferences, workshops, etc.  There is all this noise added, and the result is that people end up feeling overwhelmed and inferior rather than empowered.  I saw a presentation by Dave Jakes recently that I think was much more fitting to the way we should be engaging all this.  He spoke of the organizational approach we should be taking to collaborative tools rather than listing all the specific tools he thought we should be using.  By so doing, he effectively kept the focus where it should be, and he kept the dial right around a comfortable 5.

Here’s my point.  When does the use of all these amazing, emerging technologies become counterproductive to the goal?  Do we really need to have 20 backchannel chat rooms for a session with 35 participants?  Should you as a podcast host be trying to read everything that is happening in a chat room, while searching the web, while trying to focus on what your co-hosts are saying?

As mentioned at the outset of this post, I did have an experience recently that I feel really helped bring clarity to this issue for me.  Specifically, the idea of having a backchannel set up for people to utilize.  In fact, I think using a backchannel in the right way can absolutely make a conference, workshop, classroom, a much better place for learning.  Wes Fryer recently set up a Chatzy chat at the IL TechCon 08, and I think the way that he did it was dead-on perfect.  I plan to write more about this in my next post, but for now, I can say the way Fryer set up the backchannel at TechCon made all the difference in the way I experienced and learned from the conference.  I think it could possibly be the same for students in education.

I find it only fitting to make my first truly official blog post a somewhat imploding, inward spiraling discussion about blog posts. Somehow that seems like literary cannibalism, but don’t quote me on that.

I seriously had an incredible time building this blog. I wish there was some way I could have captured each step and created a very cool time-lapse video like that guy did of his wife every day she was pregnant. I guess the effect wouldn’t have been quite as dramatic. It’s just pretty astounding to look back at my experience and realize how much I learned about how I learn through this process.

So I began this experiment with the thought that I would establish a professional blog for reflecting and connecting with my colleagues in a field at which I am very new. I’ve been quite invested in the field of education for many years now, but it’s the educational technology leadership role that’s so fresh. I have so many ideas and so many things I’m itching to try, but I have to find the self-control to reign that all in and take things in the order in which they’re meant to be taken. That’s going to be a learning experience all on its own.

I started all this with an idea and an absolute lack of any semblance of a single web development skill. I ended up with a product I’m very proud of, and I got here through trial and error, much research, several very near misses at controlling expletives, and an enormous amount of help from a very good friend. Looking over that list, I think it’s a pretty accurate summary of the learning process, controlling expletives not withstanding. How I got to the end of my beginning is something I need to keep right at the front of my brain, so I can offer this same experience to the teachers I teach, and especially to the students who those teachers will teach.

I won’t go on anymore about this, other than to say, if you’re at all interested in how I somehow managed to get from this to where I am now, I’d love to talk it over with you. I will say, at the end of your beginning, you’ll likely look back and say it wouldn’t have happened without help. Isn’t that what makes living in today’s world so amazing? Our sense of community is growing, and I hope you and I can be an active part of that.

Thanks to Mely-O for the Flickr image.