Earlier today, I was sent a request for an email interview from a CMU undergraduate. I only had a quick turnaround time to reply (so she could get enough info to write her paper about technology in education), but her deadline encouraged me to be brief in my responses. With her permission, I share her questions and my answers here. As I prepare for many professional development events coming up in the next few weeks, this was a good time to capture some of my thoughts in such a succinct manner.

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Notes from 2010 Michigan Virtual University Online Learning Symposium
November 9, 2010 at Michigan State University

Opening Keynote: Steve Midgley, Deputy Director of Education Technology, US DOE

• Context
  • National Technology Plan (released just today), Four Components: Mobility, Social Interactions, Digital Content, Print to Online
  • This does not mean that we will have a “teacherless” curriculum, but the online marketplace offers many interesting opportunities
  • How do we find the right content and connect it with the right student with the right teacher at the right time?
  • Challenge from President Obama: “By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”
  • The crucial thing about this is that if you graduate every student in the pipeline today, we will still not meet this goal. Stats show that many students are not graduating from high school, so this implies that many people need to get re-engaged. This will only happen with online learning.
• Content
  • Teaching, Learning, Assessment — Infrastructure — Productivity
  • Assessment the way it is working today is pretty fouled up
  • Using $350 million to develop new, next generation assessment
  • DARPA project to assess Navy ensigns “in the field”
• Learning
  • Some major points
    • 21st century expertise
    • How people learn
    • Personalized learning
    • Universal design for learning
    • Informal + formal
  • Social search — more people go to YouTube from Facebook than from Google
    • What does it look like in a social context that is professional?
  • New models (Netflix/Blockbuster) — what does this look like in education?
• Assessment
  • Major points
    • Measure what matters
    • Embedded assessments
    • Real time feedback
    • Persistent learning record
    • Universal design
    • Continuous improvement
  • New models of assessment being developed being developed
  • NOTE: I haven’t read up much about this, but there is information about it being distributed through MDE and other news outlets.
• Teaching
  • Main points
  • What does “highly effective” really mean in an online environment?
  • Connected
  • Online
  • Informal + formal — we can’t organize in ways offline that we can online — some technologies require connectivity to work at all (e.g., Wikipedia)
  • Inspired
• Questions and Answers
  • Wikipedia — many schools block it, and then students are expected to use it in college to get started with research — this is crazy
  • What other “spaces” can we create for teachers to share ideas and resources? What is officially sanctioned by the state, and what is not? What is the role of textbook publishers and other research-based work to integrate with teacher knowledge?
  • We can’t test everything that we say we want kids to learn, only certain things, and some kids are learning more at different times and in different ways. So, then the question becomes what happens to kids as they figure out seat time/credit hours?
  • Intellectual property — how do teachers’ ideas get recognized in these online spaces? Creates problems with copyright and fair use. Creative Commons and Open Courseware as one option, but also some states and districts have earned RTTT money and are sharing through other avenues.

Conversation with Michigan Online Teachers of the Year

• What has surprised you about online learning?
  • The personal connection, the human touch. Part of this is about the evolution of the internet and how we use social networks today. It is very easy to develop the relationships.
  • When you never see students face-to-face, and you are teaching 125 a semester, when someone writes that “you are my favorite teacher” — that is motivating. The additional thing that surprises me is the connections that you make with your mentors and how much of a factor that they play in their students’ lives.
• What are your major apprehensions?
  • The fact that the technologies continue to change. Need to keep on top of things, for instance with the 21 Things for 21st Century Educators. (NOTE: I am not so sure that I agree with this statement — I think that there are generally principles about online learning and digital literacy that we need to know, but that we get way too caught up with the tools.)
  • If we don’t teach kids how to use their mobile phones properly, how will they learn these life skills? (NOTE: Again, I am a bit concerned about the tone that we take when we assume that we, as educators, have the “right” answer about how, when, and why we use the tools. Not that I disagree with the principle that we invite them to use these devices and applications, but I do worry that once we co-opt the digital tools and spaces that they are familiar with, we are changing the purposes and audiences for which they write and work).
  • Assessment is built in to the system — the fact that student time online is logged.
• What are the roles that teachers and students play in the process of online learning?
  • If you are just introducing it, you have to give it time. Initially, it depends on the success of the students that are there — highly motivated kids are successful and motivate other kids to continue working, too.
  • This is rewarding for teachers — we enjoy having the opportunity to teach in a more flexible model. Old model was to have AP kids in advanced classes and remedial kids in other courses (kind of a dumping ground, without mentor support). We have now moved to a model where most students who are in our courses actually get to work and achieve a passing grade.
  • We can bait the hook, but students need to bite. People talk about the way that online learning is better because it offers students new opportunities as compared to what they have experienced in school. This is especially true for students in credit recovery. Still, they have to be motivated and self-directed. (NOTE: So, in what ways does online learning really change the paradigm? That is, if students are reluctant to engage in school, for whatever reason, does the flexibility of online learning really overcome the negative feelings that they have towards school?) Can you meet them online through Skype and Adobe Connect or other similar tools?
  • What are your strategies for connecting with online students? It is not about loving your subject, it is about loving your students. Students see it and recognize it, and they reciprocate.

Lunch Keynote: Milton Chen, Senior Fellow and Director Emeritus at George Lucas Educational Foundation — “Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in our Schools” and Edutopia

• Interesting note — Chen was born in Negaunee, and his father was a mining engineer
  • “I am here as an accident of history” — China was an ally, and my father was able to come to the US and learn about mining at Penn State, and my parents were married in 1945, although my mother didn’t arrive until 1949. They didn’t plan to stay in the US, but the stayed and I was born in 1953.
• Imagine an Education Nation: “A learning society where education of children is teh highest priority, equal to a strong economy, high employment, and national security, which rely on education.”
  • The book is a “curation” of many resources from Edutopia; interesting that the magazine has been discontinued; e-books now outsell print books
  • “I think this is the first decade of the twenty-first century for education.” — we are at the tipping point.
  • Innovation — the key to creating an education nation; it is a “must do” than a “nice to know”
  • Bugscope
  • Google is 12 years old, YouTube is 5 years old, Edutopia YouTube Channel
  • Clay Shirky — we are witnessing the biggest change in human innovation and creativity in history; every media that we have ever known is now on a device in our pocket next to every other media
• These are old ideas… Dewey
  • “From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school… within the school itself while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school.” The School and Society Lecture, University of Chicago, 1899
• 6 Leading Edges of K-12 Innovation
  • Thinking
  • Curriculum and Assessment
  • Technology
  • Time/Place
  • Co-Teaching
  • Youth
• The Edge of Our Thinking: Ending the Education Wars
  • From the either/or to both/and hybrids
  • Phonics and whole language
  • Arts and core curriculum (opening minds with the arts)
  • Learning in nature and technology
• Curriculum Edge: Globalizing the Curriculum
  • Walter Payton High School, Chicago
  • The Confucius Institute
  • The internet makes learning international
• Technology Edge
  • We want all students to use technology; weapons of mass instruction (one-to-one is the weapon that we need to employ)
    • We need to reduce the 1:6 student/computer level to a one-to-one (it can be done for $250 or less, per year)
  • iPod, iListen, iRead: EUSD iRead Program
    • Technology is only technology for those who were born before it existed
    • Using the iPod as a device to record students’ own voices reading: the “missing mirror” in literacy instruction
    • This is not about just getting to the standards, this is about having kids learn more, and learn earlier
    • Have students see how other students are learning; what are the different paths that other students take and how can we learn from this public learning process?
• The Time/Place Edge
  • Getting kids out into the community for place-based learning
• Co-Teaching
• The Greatest Edge: Today’s Youth
  • Students as teaching assistants (GenYes)
  • Edutopia’s Profiles of Ten Digital Learners
  • 12-13 year old students are doing some of the most compelling work
• What is your definition of a great school?
  • Make it short, make it measurable — are the kids running into school as fast as they are running out of it; are the kids so excited about their work that they do not want to leave school?

Closing Keynote: Richard Ferdig, Kent State University

• Building the plane while we are flying it — and that’s OK
• Is K-12 online learning academically effective? — this is not the right question
  • Example of TV and video games — not good for kids, right?
  • Actually, depending on the TV or game, it is good for you.
  • Asking the right question — when are courses taught “better” online as compared to face-to-face?
  • Quote from USDOE: “On average, online learning students performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”
• So, the better question is “When is online learning academically effective?” or “Under what conditions is online learning academically effective?”
  • How is online more effective? What are the conditions under which it is more effective?
  • Is “X” technology better for learning? — Sometimes (under certain conditions)
• So, when is K-12 online learning academically effective?
  • Two reports about professional development for online instructors and student learning
  • Virtual School Clearinghouse
  • iNACOL – Conference and Book
• So, what do we look at?
  • Student and Teacher
    • With teachers, we know that a teacher has a significant role in mentoring students through their online experiences
    • Highly qualified teachers matter in virtual schooling as well
    • How can we get highly qualified teachers?
      • Professional development — because not any teacher can teach online, they need particular skill sets for teaching online — engaging parents and mentors, using virtual school resources
      • Teacher education is not the answer — they are not working with K-12 online schools. Do they have virtual internship programs? Most teachers leave colleges of education without any preparation to teach online.
      • Lack of PD opportunities – not all have online experiences, only 21% had a customized experience
      • Does PD work — sometimes. PD only works when teachers take charge of their PD experience.
      • PCK — talk about teacher knowledge for practice, in practice, and of practice
      • Classroom — inquiry — community
      • Suggestions/Recommendations:
        • Record and reflect on exemplary practice
        • Ownership of the PD model, using innovative means and tools
  • • Does online learning affect student retention?
      • Retention is a significant problem, and they drop out for different reasons such as their own individual reasons, or institutional reasons. This happens at key transitions points, students are myopic, and there are disconnected understandings about what is happening and why.
    • Solutions
      • Better communication
      • Individualized instruction
      • Additional mentoring
      • Connections to jobs
    • Why did it work?
      • Accepted by peers
      • Accepted by online teachers
      • Learning styles were met
      • Connections to real world
      • More opportunities for expression
      • In short, all the reasons they dropped out of their F2F school is why they succeeded online
• Understanding Virtual Schools
  • 80/20 — most of what happens across states is common, although there are some unique features depending on the state
    • Partnerships — including school, university, research, and evaluation
    • Exponential growth
    • Retaining both students and teachers
    • The funding dilemma/opportunity
  • Best practices
    • Engage in attention on pedagogy, innovation with technology, etc.
• What are some ways to get to better practice?
  • Social media tools
  • Innovative tools — games/sims (Mission Biotech, OpenSim, Scratch, Yoyogames)
  • Kent State vStem Classroom

Reflections on the day

Along with all the technology interests that I have had over the years, my formal introduction to online learning began around the turn of the century when I was trained as an online instructor with the Michigan Virtual High School. Because of a variety of reasons, not the least of which was starting grad school, I taught my last online course for them in 2002. Given my continuing interests in online and hybrid models of learning — especially in professional development for teachers — it was good to come to the conference today and get reconnected with the state of online learning.

I do have significant concerns about the commercialization of online learning and how models like MIVU, Blackboard, textbook companies selling products, charter schools and other organizations who are working, in one way or another, for a profit versus the model of open courseware, collaboration, hybridity, and free or opensource web-based tools. This is a significant wedge that continues to grow. For instance, I set my courses up with a wiki, invite students to use free tools for collaboration and bibliography management, and engage with a variety of other tools. contrast this with the subscription that my university pays for to use Blackboard, including all the proprietary tools and content management.

One of the resources that I was reminded of, and I know I need to continue my participation in, is Edutopia. Milton Chen talked about the many ways that educators are innovating, and that the “internet makes learning international.” It’s been one year since I was invited to be a moderator of a group on Multimedia Literacy, and I need to get involved again.

Also, the implications for professional development for online teachers has just as much, if not more, resonance with our needs for traditional professional development. One of the main points that I will take from the final talk by Richard Ferdig is the fact that teachers, like students, need customized, just-in-time learning opportunities to find out more about how to teach and learn in their own context. I hope that we are doing some of that with our work this year in the CRWP/CGRESD partnership, and I look forward to seeing results from that work.

It was an interesting day, especially in the sense that this conference was one that I chose to attend because it was outside of my normal areas of conference-going, yet remained on the border of them and moved my thinking forward in new ways.

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A smorgasbord of sessions from SITE 2010 with the notes I was able to catch from each (some more than others)… enjoy!

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Notes from “Pre-Service English Teachers and Web 2.0: Teaching and Learning Literacy with Digital Applications”

Luke Rodesiler and Lauren Tripp, University of Florida

• Helping pre-service teachers re-imagine what it means to be literate
  • Tools including VoiceThread, PBWorks, and Xtranormal
  • Theoretical framework including social constructionism, interactional elements of effective literacy instruction and how texts are constructed
• Primary research questions:
  • What understandings of technology do prospective English teachers receal when they are describing their technology use in public school classrooms?
  • How do prospective English teachers understandings of technology change as they become familiar with Web 2.0 applications?
  • How do prospective English teachers understand the role of Web 2.0 applications in teaching?
• Data sources:
  • Surveys with open and closed ended questions to gain understandings of their technology use in the classroom
  • Classroom observations of student teachers in context
  • Artifacts of student work, including assignments and reflections
  • Focus group interviews at the end of the semester
• Data analysis
  • Quantitative analysis of survey data
  • Qualitative analysis of classroom observations, student work, and focus group interviews
• Findings
  • Student teachers were using technology in narrowly conceived ways
    • Accessing web content to search for and/or enhance lessons
    • Using Power Point to present information
    • “When I was in my internship, YouTube and Google was all I thought of using…”
  • Understanding how Web 2.0 technologies could foster collaboration and support teaching and learning where enhanced
    • Recognized collaborative tools
    • Their own facility with technology
    • Own discourse about teaching
    • Future organization and distribution of student work
  • Collaborative effort — how this experience could work as a method for professional learning
  • Made connections between the affordances of Web 2.0 applications and literacy practices valued in English language arts
    • Potential for student collaboration, revision of student writing, engaging students
• Conclusions
  • Many students were unaware, yet were nudged toward more nuanced views of technology, texts, and literacy practices
  • We saw a shift in perception from “web-for-consumption” to “web-for-production” (using wikis, for instance)
• Concerns
  • Lack of computer and internet access in schools
  • Expanding definitions of literacy
  • Personal use of technologies vs. professional use
• Further questions
  • How can we support pre-service teachers in recognizing the availability of the tools
  • How can we expand their notions of literacy outside of technology
  • How can we help them build their personal learning network

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Doug Hartman, from MSU’s Literacy Achievement Resource Center, spoke at MRA 2010 on “The Future of Reading and Writing at the Present Time: Preparing Students and Teachers for the 21st Century.”

Update – 3/30/10 – Embedded Slideshare Presentation

He outlined four shifts that are happening as we continue to think about new literacies and technologies:

• Shift 1: The technologies students use for reading and writing are changing
  • Student whose experience with Alice in Wonderland, and her viewing of the new version from Tim Burton
    • International Children’s Digital Library — she is able to see the original version of Alice in Wonderland as it was printed
    • Finds a 1903 silent movie version of Alice in Wonderland
  • Kaiser Family Foundation Report suggests that teens are reading more online now than they are reading offline
    • 64% of American teens are online creators
    • 35% of girls who are online are blogging, 20% of boys; about 50% read blogs
  • NYT story on a reading family
  • How students apply to college — students using digital videos to create a college application “essay” (from NPR)
  • 6000 year history of literacy in just a few minutes (note: technologies don’t just go away… some features may return over time; e.g. “scrolling” and “tablets”)
    • finger writing in the earth
    • sticks and brushes
    • hieroglyphics
    • clay tablet
    • scroll (moving from clay to scroll was a dazzling shift at that time — length and durability)
    • codex/book
    • now we are moving from the book to the screen
  • Medieval Help Desk Video
  • Linguistic texts to semiotic texts (images, audio, etc)
    • The balance is tipping towards semiotic texts
    • Semiotic texts are increasingly digital
    • Digital texts are ever more online
    • Reading and viewing across these texts
  • Questions to pose:
    • Do our curriculum, standards, and assessments include the range of technologies that our students use?
• Shift 2: The strategies that students use to read and write these texts are changing
  • Looking for information to supplement what they are able to find in textbooks and is able to find so much more
    • Reading the book, looks up words he doesn’t know, and may use a secondary source
    • Reading online requires different strategies — moving from one web page to another, back to the original, and one way leading on to another; the potential for his comprehension to be expanded is enormous
    • This second type of comprehension places a higher demand on people’s cognitive abilities than typical book reading
  • Types of knowledge for reading: declarative, procedural, and conditional; once online, also adding identity, locational, and goal knowledge. Read more on his Slideshare document. (NOTE: He said that the slides from this presentation will be posted there later today.)
  • Do our curriculum, standards, and assessments include the range of strategies  that our students use?
• Shift 3 and 4 — ran out of time in the session, but “moment to moment instruction” and “professional development” are the third and fourth shifts

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Alfie Kohn, an outspoken critic of traditional schooling and standardized testing, spoke at CMU on Wednesday, March 17, 2010. Here are some notes I captured from his talk, “Overhauling the Transmission Model: An overview of traditional versus progressive teaching”

• You may know if you have been a student or teacher that learning is not simply a process of absorbing information throw at you, but if that is true then it makes sense for this presentation to not be about me just talking at you
• What I am going to describe for you is a first grade classroom in New England, where kids were studying the Mayflower, and the kids showed up to see that the chairs and tables were pushed to the edge of the room and the floor had an outline of a ship made in masking tape.
  • A classmate comes in and unrolls a scroll from the king — we cannot sail on the ship until we know how big it is. Teacher asks — any ideas for how to figure this out? Figuring out how tall a student is, using him as a measure, then with hands, etc. The king doesn’t know how long the child, the hands, etc are.
  • They don’t get it that day, but they return to it the next day… measure it with the classmate’s feet… he knows the king!
  • Finally, on the third day, the teacher finally introduces the concept of standard units of measurement, and gives them rulers.
  • What distinguishes this lesson, makes it unusual?
    • She took three days to let the students discover this concept; “covering” material makes you feel that you don’t have enough time — this is about “discovering” material
    • There was a rationale, not just “open wide” and here come the facts
    • Basis for life-long learning and problem solving
    • It was connected and inter-disciplinary
    • It was generative and collaborative
    • Invited the children to use their imaginations
    • Both hands-on and minds-on — they were inventing the idea of a ruler and figuring out standard units of measure
• How might we find teaching and learning more generative if we were involved in these types of classrooms?
• Middle school example — what questions do you have about yourself? What questions do you have about the world?
  • Looking at questions together to develop themes, then the teacher takes themes from each of the groups and to synthesize what students are saying to look at some overarching themes to intrigue them all. Examples: conflict and war, the future, etc. This becomes the overarching curriculum for the entire school for the entire year. Teachers in this school see them as generalists first, then content area specialists second.
  • The teaching is organized around questions that the kids themselves have asked. The students themselves become scholars, far more engaged in what they are doing than in traditional school settings.
• High school example — Harvey Daniels and Best Practice High School, Chicago
  • Cross-disciplinary unit on fast food and how it connects to health, economics, popular culture, etc.
  • Read Fast Food Nation and connected it to content in biology related to nutrition, digestion, etc.
  • Students then chose from magazine articles about the fast food industry — animal cruelty, locations of fast food in low-income neighborhoods, etc.
  • Went to restaurants and kept anthropological observation journals of patrons and employees
  • Some became activists around the issue
  • Did they test at the end? No… they kept portfolios of letters, pamphlets, and other materials that they created
• What can we do in classrooms to make this happen?
• Setting up a false dichotomy… but one to use as a way to compare/contrast…
  • Traditional — skill and drill (although, “traditional” models in the sense of being “old” is multiage learning and apprenticeship models)
  • A new, progressive way… as exemplified by the examples I offered
    • Differences:
      • Traditional — the purpose is to get the “right” answer and spit it out on demand to the teacher who has all the power and will determine who talks when (the point is not to have an intellectual conversation, but to give the one answer that the teacher wants, the one that she is fishing for)
        • What to Look for in a Classroom (from alfiekohn.com)
        • I want to see stuff from the kids on the walls… but what does it look like? I don’t want all the pumpkins on the wall in a kindergarten room to look the same.
        • How to teach kids to read — a teacher thinking about phonics may look at the phonemes, the progressive teacher will focus on meaning
        • Standardized tests measure what we need least; efforts to improve tests scores lead to less authentic learning
        • Mom asks “what did you do in school today?” Kid answers, “nothing.” He is probably right — he may have had a lot done to him.
      • Old school — bunch of facts and skills. Worksheets to learn how to add, but not applying it.
        • Progressive school — facts and skills are taught in a context.
        • It is easier, not just more interesting, to make sense of this if there is a context… “I think that I could read this if I knew what it was about.”
      • Traditional — no good reason for learning
      • Progressive — create a lesson with and for your students that will engage them
• When I talk about this in terms of context, problem-based learning, etc… I am referring to the idea that teachers have a collection of facts to but into students’ heads ala Dewey, Freire
  • When the kids have nothing to say about the course, the curriculum… consider the “ten year” question. What is left of your course after a decade has passed? We are creating elaborate snow structures on the last day before spring… it drains right out again if we are not helping students learn in real ways. We are meaning-makers, and we work from a constructivist approach. The best learning is a process of reconstructing ideas.
  • When people talk about making things more “rigorous,” we should be worried about that…
  • We often think that AP courses are the best courses in the high school because they are “accelerated”
  • It almost always works out that when we are trying to “raise the bar” and “close the gap,” we have kids who are poor who are being given more drill and skill while the rich kids are doing more real learning.
• Last effect of traditional education is the loss of curiosity
  • As kids move into school, their intrinsic motivation dies off as a response to traditional instruction
• Final question — if everything I have said is true, especially if progressive schools are proven by research to be effective, then why is the traditional approach still so common?
  • It is difficult to do well
  • Not given training in college
  • We teach how we are taught
  • “Any idiot can stay one chapter ahead of the kids”
  • Top down leadership; lack of autonomy
• Q/A
  • Books: effects of grading, negative effects of homework, negatives of standardized tests, bribes and threats of disciplines
  • Check out Diane Ravitch‘s “Death and Life of the Great American School“
  • Question to ask at schools — How do you hope these kids will turn out? Happiness, problem-solving, ethics — these are the things that we care about in the long run and these are the criteria we should set as “standards”
  • Ted Sizer‘s work on the Coalition of Essential Schools
  • The teachers who were glad to have me didn’t need me; the ones who didn’t want to talk fit the model of traditional education

Reflections

Alfie Kohn certainly stays on message, despite his “digressions.” I first started reading him over a decade ago, saw him speak about five years ago, and have been influenced by his ideas in many ways. There are some points that I disagree on, especially the idea that assessment is — in and of itself — an almost evil force, because I think that we can do assessment in responsible ways that help kids learn and help teachers teach. But, overall, he reiterates the negative data (and anecdotes) about testing, grading, skill and drill teaching, and awards for kids that he has been discussing for years. As I think about writing instruction, especially in an age of technology, I think that we can take some of these ideas and look at how a writing workshop approach can foster student learning in a constructivist manner, one that values the context in which students work and the authentic inquiry that they choose to pursue.

I think, too, that we have to recognize the overwhelming forces that teachers face — it is not just about individual choices inside our own classrooms, although that is important; it is about the structural aspects of schooling and the expectations of our society that place particular demands on schools, teachers, and students. At the end, he began to talk about the socio-economic and political influences on our system of education, and I think that we really need to talk more about these influences because they permeate our classrooms. Teachers can be progressive within their four walls, or their school, but that is not going to create substantive change in the system. It is a start, indeed, but will not change the entire system.

At any rate, I know that many of my CMU students were in the audience, and my sincere hope is that they have gained some insights into some of the perspectives that I bring to ENG 315. I try to alleviate the pressures of grading and invite them to think critically and creatively about what they can do as writers and teachers of writing. I ask them to do authentic writing, both personally and professionally, and I do not rely on tests in any way. Instead, I ask them to write in different genres, for different purposes, and to different audiences. As one student said in class the other night, “This is a lot of work.” Indeed, it is. And, I know that it is overwhelming and that my class doesn’t meet the expectations that they have of what a college course, or a methods course, should look like. Yet, I think that it is valuable work, and I hope that it will encourage them as writers and teachers of writing to be a little more, as Kohn would suggest, “progressive” in their own classrooms.

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Last fall, Sara and I had opportunity to sit in on some conversations about MSU’s EdTech Hybrid PhD program, and Punya Mishra has recently written about this on his blog:

And finally, if you still aren’t satisfied… you can also work towards a Ph.D in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology! Designed for bright, established professionals currently serving in K-12 schools, community colleges, universities, policy centers, and research institutions, the goal of the Ph.D. program in Educational Psychology & Educational Technology is to prepare the next generation of educational leaders with the requisite skills to direct learning as it forges forth at the intersection of the growing world of digital media, online learning environments and traditional face-to-face practice.  You can complete the Ph.D. program either on-campus in East Lansing (with graduate assistantship or fellowship support) or, (and this is the most exciting) keep your day-job, and complete the program over summers, with courses taken online, in a new cohort-based hybrid option. You can read my initial abut this here.

Exciting!! Edupunk refresher, hybrid PhD & more…

Curt Bonk, author of The World Is Open, a book I am reading right now, also interviews Punya on his blog.

As I continue to think more and more about the possibilities of online learning, especially hybrid models, I will be curious to see how this doctoral program develops, both personally (as an alum of MSU and the spouse of a current student) and a professional interested in what we can offer through our own writing project. Best of luck to my colleagues and friends at MSU!

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An NWP colleague, Natalie Bernasconi from the Central California Writing Project, recently sent an email with some questions:

I’m interested in how infusing technology into the classroom as exemplified by Youth Voices and other initiatives changes the way teachers see their own role and their own identity.

I’m also interested in examining the relationship between teachers’ sense of identity and their pedagogical philosophy (and how technology can cause that to shift). There are the cliched metaphors: sage on the stage, guide on the side. If you were to select a metaphor for how you see your own role as a teacher, what would you pick?

And, here is my response…

Looking at the idea of transformative technology integration and how teachers see their own role and identity, I think that the biggest shift for me comes when teachers stop looking at it as “integration” of technology and just see it as a part of their teaching.

At risk of being glib, I will characterize the shift that I see as this… most teachers that I encounter, when beginning a class or a professional development initiative claim to be “not very techie,” even if, in fact, they are. I think that this stems from two causes. One, they simply don’t feel confident in the technology that they do know, even though they may know a great deal about it; they don’t want to risk looking like they don’t know something in front of students. Second, they see barriers to technology use (filters, software, hardware), and, for a variety of reasons, choose not to advocate on their own behalf for getting access to that technology for them and their students. Again, I don’t mean to generalize and criticize, it’s just this is the pattern that I generally see.

To that end, when teachers finally gain some confidence, then also take the risk and invite students to work with technology (even if they do now know it well themselves). Once they experience some successes, they begin to just think about what they are teaching and the technology becomes a part of that conversation, not just as an after-thought or as an add-on. At that point, it is not so much about the technology, but about the literacy practices that the technologies enable.

Looking at the idea of a teacher’s sense of identity and their pedagogical philosophy, I suppose that I would talk most about the work that I did with seven Red Cedar Writing Project teachers for my dissertation project. In that project, they created digital portfolios that represented their teacher research through digital portfolios. Once they took that intentional focus to represent their own identity through a website, it became clear that they had to think not only about design, colors, and fonts, they also had to ask pedagogical and ethical questions that then showed up in their work. We wrote two articles about this process, on for English Journal and one for the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. Also, you will want to look at some of the work on Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK).

My metaphor. Oh boy… I suppose that those models of guide on the side and other ones like that are overused. So, the one that I keep coming back to when I work with teachers is that we are all on a ladder, learning more and more about technology and literacy each day. Typically, what happens is that I find myself on one rung of the ladder, usually just a few steps (or less) ahead of the teachers with whom I am working. Then, they begin climbing as we go through a PD experience and, eventually, they ask me a question that I don’t know the answer too, a rung or two above where I am at. So, I reach, and I learn, and I come back and teach them more. Then they climb. Then they ask. Then I climb, and so on. So, we keep climbing the ladder, sometimes pulling and sometimes pushing, but most of the time simply climbing in tandem. I hope that makes sense.



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