Librarians said it felt similar to hosting a book club, but unlike preparing for a book discussion, they had less knowledge in advance. In many cases, the librarians learned alongside students as they completed the course.

Learning Circles add a social element to what is otherwise a solitary learning experience by bringing people together in person to take an online course together over six to eight weeks, with the help of a facilitator.

For all the promises of online courses disrupting education, completion rates are notoriously low. Some studies found that about five percent of those enrolled in massive open online courses (known as MOOCs) completed the course. And those who took the courses tended to be more educated already – 70 percent of survey respondents had bachelors degrees and 39 percent identified as teachers or former teachers.

Dave Cormier

The work of scholarship should be the work of imagination.

Students with digital access can now go to the library and pore over the books they are most interested in, with or without permission, with or without curriculum, and generally entirely without a rubric, learning outcomes, or scaffolding. Dinosaurs were not a popular subject at my elementary school, and independent study for a fifth grader wasn’t rewarded. My motivations were entirely those of my hungry imagination. For many of today’s students, those dinosaurs of mine are everywhere. In every nook and cranny of their days. And in their back pockets.

For now, there are no texts, so we’ll go digging in the dirt.

We can no longer look for the old structures of rigor echoed in this more rambunctious learning.

It’s the kind of thing that many instructors new to the digital — or leery of its experimentation — shrug off as teaching that requires no real effort and no real accountability.

Audrey Watters

In part, this is because the use of digital technology to widen the parameters of human interaction and knowledge production is still in its most experimental stage. It’s not kids reading about dinosaurs in books, it’s passionate paleontologists picking at the dirt in the middle of Wyoming.

BUT...I can empathize with the questions. It's understandable that teachers and principals might want limits on availability.

Teachers have a lot going on during class and with a rule like this, teachers that move around the room interacting with students can keep their students on the desired site effectively.

Then I saw a tweet from Richard Wells @EduWells - “How do we scaffold self-management?” I followed that discussion, and there were some great thoughts - break it into small chunks and help students identify behaviors from Jacque Allen @jacquea, set mini goals within the student’s zone of proximal development from Barend Blom @blominator.

At the very least, it lets me know just how far I fell into the seemingly never-ending time suck of facebook or Inside Texas - my Longhorn Football fix.

Teachers have a lot going on during class and with a rule like this, teachers that move around the room interacting with students can keep their students on the desired site effectively.

Then I saw a tweet from Richard Wells @EduWells - “How do we scaffold self-management?” I followed that discussion, and there were some great thoughts - break it into small chunks and help students identify behaviors from Jacque Allen @jacquea, set mini goals within the student’s zone of proximal development from Barend Blom @blominator.

At the very least, it lets me know just how far I fell into the seemingly never-ending time suck of facebook or Inside Texas - my Longhorn Football fix.

BUT...I can empathize with the questions. It's understandable that teachers and principals might want limits on availability.

She hasn’t gone back. A group of friends sitting with her in the Mouse offices, all boys, shook their heads in sympathy; they’ve seen this behavior “everywhere,” one said. I have been unable to find solid statistics on how frequently harassment happens in Minecraft. In the broader world of online games, though, there is more evidence: An academic study of online players of Halo, a shoot-’em-up game, found that women were harassed twice as often as men, and in an unscientific poll of 874 self-­described online gamers, 63 percent of women reported “sex-­based taunting, harassment or threats.” Parents are sometimes more fretful than the players; a few told me they didn’t let their daughters play online. Not all girls experience harassment in Minecraft, of course — Lea, for one, told me it has never happened to her — and it is easy to play online without disclosing your gender, age or name. In-game avatars can even be animals.

Three years ago, the public library in Darien, Conn., decided to host its own Minecraft server. To play, kids must acquire a library card. More than 900 kids have signed up, according to John Blyberg, the library’s assistant director for innovation and user experience. “The kids are really a community,” he told me. To prevent conflict, the library installed plug-ins that give players a chunk of land in the game that only they can access, unless they explicitly allow someone else to do so. Even so, conflict arises. “I’ll get a call saying, ‘This is Dasher80, and someone has come in and destroyed my house,’ ” Blyberg says. Sometimes library administrators will step in to adjudicate the dispute. But this is increasingly rare, Blyberg says. “Generally, the self-­governing takes over. I’ll log in, and there’ll be 10 or 15 messages, and it’ll start with, ‘So-and-so stole this,’ and each message is more of this,” he says. “And at the end, it’ll be: ‘It’s O.K., we worked it out! Disregard this message!’ ”

What this means is that kids are constantly negotiating what are, at heart, questions of governance. Will their world be a free-for-all, in which everyone can create and destroy everything? What happens if someone breaks the rules? Should they, like London, employ plug-ins to prevent damage, in effect using software to enforce property rights? There are now hundreds of such governance plug-ins.

Next year he plans to study computer science in college. “In the redstone community,” he says, “a lot of people around me are programmers.” Teaching himself coding is much like learning Minecraft, he found; you experiment, ask questions on Internet forums. He described his YouTube channel on his college application, and that, too, “seems to have helped,” he says. The university accepted him without even seeing his final school grades.

Minecraft, as the novelist and technology writer Robin Sloan has observed, is “a game about secret knowledge.”

One player spent weeks assembling a giant roller coaster whose carts were powered by redstone tracks only to have an update change the way rails functioned, and the entire roller-­coaster mechanism never worked again. Others ruefully described spending months crafting cities on their own multiplayer servers, only to have a server crash and destroy everything.

Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a ­founder of Connected Camps, an online program where kids play Minecraft together, has closely studied gamers and learning. Ito points out that when kids delve into this hackerlike side of the game — concocting redstone devices or creating command blocks — they often wind up consulting discussion forums online, where they get advice from adult Minecraft players. These folks are often full-time programmers who love the game, and so younger kids and teenagers wind up in conversation with professionals.

nytmag.hypixel.net

These AND and OR gates are, in virtual form, the same as the circuitry you’d find inside a computer chip. They’re also like the Boolean logic that programmers employ every day in their code. Together, these simple gates let Minecraft players construct machines of astonishing complexity.

The game was a hit. But Persson became unsettled by his fame, as well as the incessant demands of his increasingly impassioned fans — who barraged him with emails, tweets and forum posts, imploring him to add new elements to Minecraft, or complaining when he updated the game and changed something. By 2014, he’d had enough. After selling Minecraft to Microsoft, he hunkered down in a $70 million mansion in Beverly Hills and now refuses to talk about Minecraft any more.

In this way, Minecraft has succeeded Lego as the respectable creative toy. When it was first sold in the postwar period, Lego presented itself as the heir to the heritage of playing with blocks. (One ad read: “It’s a pleasure to see children playing with Lego — Lego play is quiet and stimulating. Children learn to grapple with major tasks and solve them together.”) Today many cultural observers argue that Lego has moved away from that open-­ended engagement, because it’s so often sold in branded kits: the Hogwarts castle from “Harry Potter,” the TIE fighter from “Star Wars.”

The Danish landscape architect Carl Theodor Sorensen urged that areas in cities ruined by World War II be turned into “junk playgrounds,” where children would be given pickaxes, hammers and saws and allowed to shape the detritus into a new civilization, at child scale. (Several were in fact created in Europe and were quite popular.) In Sweden, educators worried that industrialization and the mechanization of society were causing children to lose touch with physical skills; they began teaching sloyd, or woodcrafting, a practice that continues today.

Children would start with simple blocks, build up to more complex patterns, then begin to see these patterns in the world around them. Educators like Maria Montessori picked up on this concept and pioneered the teaching of math through wooden devices.

As Ian Bogost, a game designer and professor of media studies at Georgia Tech, puts it, Minecraft may well be this generation’s personal computer.

Minecraft encourages kids to get under the hood

He built a pen out of gray stones and installed “pressure plates” on the floor that triggered a trap inside the maze. He stuck the mooshroom inside, where it would totter on and off the plates in an irregular pattern.

If no learners or students depend on us how can we be teachers? "What do you do?" "I'm a teacher." "Oh yeah? But there are no students." "So?"

Sometimes, not often, I was almost envious. He had died doing what gave him meaning. This is 'my direction.' I had a short Twitter exchange

I found the page with the cage that I had drawn at the age of twenty one on graduating.

Research on the brain is often among the most impenetrable for a lay audience but the knowledge that is being produced by neuroscientists, if communicated well, may be the spark that finally ignites productive change in mathematics classrooms and homes across the country.

It is hardly surprising that students so often feel that math is inaccessible and uninteresting when they are plunged into a world of abstraction and numbers in classrooms. Students are made to memorize math facts, and plough through worksheets of numbers, with few visual or creative representations of math, often because of policy directives and faulty curriculum guides.

Stopping students from using their fingers when they count could, according to the new brain research, be akin to halting their mathematical development. Fingers are probably one of our most useful visual aids, and the finger area of our brain is used well into adulthood.

That knowledge is critical. As Brian Butterworth, a leading researcher in this area, has written, if students aren’t learning about numbers through thinking about their fingers, numbers “will never have a normal representation in the brain.”

A mother called me to report that her 5-year-old daughter had come home from school crying because her teacher had not allowed her to count on her fingers. This is not an isolated event—schools across the country regularly ban finger use in classrooms or communicate to students that they are babyish.

Kids today are learning, engaging, and producing in richly productive and collaborative ways.

I take notes on how Taibbi crafted and organized

At the same time, there is a need for the development or improvement of measures of students' technical, occupational, and career readiness skills. Finally, there are a number of existing career-focused schools or programs and state or district policies or reforms to support CTE that need to be evaluated to determine their impact on student education outcomes: e.g., awarding of vocational diplomas, district use of career-readiness measures, implementation of career academy models, awarding academic credit for CTE courses, schools' offering of online career exploration tools, and CTE teacher certification requirements.

connections with employers and postsecondary institutions, increased emphasis on industry credentials, innovative delivery structures such as career academies and pathways, and increases in state funding to enact policies to support CTE expansion.

There’s a lot of truth to that. Female bloggers have a long, sordid history of harassment on the Web—Gamergate is just the tip of the iceberg—and while Genius-enabled annotations could theoretically bring a larger audience to unknown writers, some denizens of the Internet are not seeking to broaden their page views; they actively wish to stay in their own circles, avoiding potential readers who are likely to be unfriendly.

“But your blog is public! People can comment on Twitter, Fb etc; Genius is in its simplest form a more efficient tool for this.”

In those decades everyone, white and black, had jobs at the docks and the plants and the mills, and the middle class was prosperous and unions were strong and income taxes were high and inequality was low. But then those jobs were automated or went to the Carolinas and Mexico and China, and the middle-class and unions went soft and taxes went down and inequality shot up, and because of all this the cities declined.

$100,000 loan from the Baltimore Development Corporation to help cover the cost of the shuttle

“As much attention as we give to the trials of the officers who are charged with killing Freddie Gray, we should give to a decision that implicates 10,000 construction jobs and billions of dollars of infrastructure investment in Baltimore that were eliminated in a single day by a single decision made by a single person.

“What happens to the trees we were planning, the other designs? Who do we talk to?”

And Richard Chambers, a local transit activist, rose to demand why the cancellation of such a major project wasn’t being challenged from a civil rights perspective. He pointed out that the state legislature had voted on an increase in the gas tax with the understanding that it would be used for a transit project to benefit low-income minorities in Baltimore. Instead, the money was now being entirely redirected to road projects in wealthier, mostly white outlying areas. “It’s almost unprecedented,” he said. “This is a ‘fuck you’ to Baltimore.”

Not only were the gleaming new buildings — largely focused on stimulating tourism — not doing much to benefit those in nearby West and East Baltimore; the subsidized projects were, quite literally, capitalizing on their struggles: their private sector developers were qualifying for tax breaks from the city on the grounds that things were so bleak so close by that the only way these new projects could succeed was with public subsidy. The men who ran the Baltimore Development Corporation had a phrase for it: “the Baltimore arithmetic.”

When students got out of Frederick Douglass High and other nearby schools that Monday afternoon, just after Freddie Gray’s memorial service had concluded, and headed for Mondawmin Mall, the transit hub for some 5,000 of them, they found several hundred police waiting, mobilized by social media rumors

Any fallout Hogan might have risked from his decision was quickly overshadowed by the events of the city’s terrible summer of 2015

the Democratic former mayor of Baltimore, Martin O’Malley, was more supportive, but over his two terms he didn’t act with much urgency — as much as he championed his city, he’d never focused closely on its inadequate public transit, and the NIMBY resistance to the line in Canton had given him pause

Schmoke’s efforts to de-escalate the campaign were the partial inspiration for the “Hamsterdam” episodes of The Wire, described by one commentator as its “bravest and most radical story line.

In these precincts, an air of liberal concern for the rest of the city predominated — these residents were, after all, willing to pay far higher taxes than they would if they moved to the County. But the extremity of the gaps was undeniable: life expectancy in Roland Park was twenty years longer than in West Baltimore neighborhoods like Sandtown-Wincester or Harlem Park or Upton-Druid Heights.

“And once they get to school and maybe don’t have their homework and maybe haven’t had their breakfast, what’s the teacher’s reaction to that student?” Ifill said in an interview. “What’s our reaction as a society to those children? We talk about that mother, about people not doing their job. But we aren’t willing to follow the thread to that bus stop on Edmondson Avenue — to understand the larger problems in the context of transportation decisions over decades, in the context of why Baltimore doesn’t have a city-wide system.”

a bewildering scattering of lines that typically followed the old streetcar routes, comprehensible only to those with no alternative but to rely on them

Baltimore had unraveled — had been unraveling for decades, unspooling itself over a wide expanse of central Maryland

“Students were trapped in the mess, whether they were choosing to participate or not,” one teacher who’d witnessed the scene recounted in a post on Facebook.

Flint residents still want to know when they can again safely drink unfiltered water from their faucets.

his 75-point plan.

And in Flint, some residents are frustrated that the plan doesn't call for immediately removing all lead service lines.

“How do you fight millions of dollars of fraudulent commercials pushing for crooked politicians?”

The definition of blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns: (1) at least in part through online learning, with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace; (2) at least in part in a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home; (3) and the modalities along each student’s learning path within a course or subject are connected to provide an integrated learning experience. The majority of blended-learning programs resemble one of four models: Rotation, Flex, A La Carte, and Enriched Virtual. The Rotation model includes four sub-models: Station Rotation, Lab Rotation, Flipped Classroom, and Individual Rotation.

1.  EVERY SCHOOL NEEDS A VISION.

I’ve quickly become overwhelmed by the flood of acronyms — and more and more convinced that they are being tossed around without much consensus about what they mean in terms of course structure and instructional quality. Saying that your course utilizes blended learning may elicit approving nods, but structure does not strong pedagogy magically make. I think that it is important for us as educators to remember that it is our job to mix and match and pick and choose from the tools available and make them work to meet the needs of the students in front of us. As I’ve oft repeated in my posts, it is fundamentally human, relational work (with tech assistance).

A teacher who made a successful foray into blended learning shares five helpful tips for exploring the process. For the past several months, teachers have regularly posted cries for help like this one on my blog: "My school is transitioning to the Common Core State Standards, and teachers are being asked to integrate technology. I'm overwhelmed by the prospect!" Many of these pleas come from veteran teachers with years of classroom experience.

On Saturday, Lewandowski was again caught getting rough on camera, this time with a protester in Arizona, and again the campaign denied it despite visual evidence.

We used to fact-check everything, every day,” another reporter told me, “but it gets hard to keep up.” For a writer filing on deadline an hour after a rally ends, there’s not enough time to thoroughly fact-check the dozens of fabrications that spilled from the stage. It’s also hard to know who the fact-checking is for. At this point, anyone who hates Trump has ample evidence he’s a liar. And anyone who loves Trump doesn’t care.

I ask Hidalgo if she visits news sites or anything political. No way, she says: "I'm paying for this; I'm not going to waste my money on politics."

People for Bernie, a large unofficial pro-Sanders organization founded by veterans of the Occupy movement and other lefty activists.

Less than two weeks ago, Mr. Lewandowski was accused of roughly grabbing a reporter from Breitbart News, Michelle Fields, as she tried to trail Mr. Trump to ask a question after a news conference in Jupiter, Fla. Ms. Fields has filed a police complaint against Mr. Lewandowski, who has not been charged. He has denied that anything happened and has called her “delusional” on Twitter.

In another incident, cameras recorded Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and a man who appears to be a member of the security detail confronting a protester.

another in an American flag shirt

Michael, a CLMOOC participant who had participated in the 2013 CLMOOC and had then spent the school year remixing his classroom space based on newfound desires for creating a learning-centered classroom, tweeted in response that there should be a special in-depth CLMOOC-hosted Make with Me Google Hangout devoted to the conversation. Rather than a space for focused discussion about an idea, Make with Me’s were typically focused on sharing and demonstrating approaches to making and composing. However, the participation structure afforded extended conversations, allowing participants to delve deeply into their shared inquiry questions. In the next tweet, Karen, a CLMOOC facilitator, who had also expressed that she was challenged with the idea of “story” across the weeks, agreed to do the backend work to set up the Hangout through the CLMOOC website. It was then co-hosted by Karen and Michelle with five other participants and facilitators on the screen and several simultaneously tweeting during and after the Hangout. In these ways, they appropriated the Make with Me Google Hangout structure to sustain and grow a participant-driven conversation.

Undeterred, both Amy and Terry responded saying that they were not offended or disrupted. Amy tagged Vera again stating that she wasn’t offended by the comments and hoped that the sharing of images would promote a discussion of perspectives on those images. Terry rejoined similarly with, “No exception taken by me here. So glad to see folks engaging”. He then continued to interrogate the United States’ border actions, linking the anti-immigrant tide to issues like the Common Core State Standards, as a sorting and privileging function. He ended with an invocation to elaborate on images because “like quotes, they don’t speak for themselves”. Encouraging participants to come to voice and develop positions and stances that must be articulated in nuanced ways. Amy then posted a comment that agreed wholeheartedly with Terry’s invitation. Next, Vera shared a link to a petition for child refugee resources and a blog post she composed herself in response to this interaction that curated new posts, news, petitions, activism, and blog rolls around both adjunct labor conditions in the academy and immigration issues. Original blog author Ava rounded out the discussion by thanking participants for taking up her work and detailed a para-curricular workshop she taught with undocumented youth which engaged them in analyzing multimodal texts and producing compositions that worked at the intersections of image and words to articulate experience and promote reflective and empathetic connections.

a livestreamed Google Hangout which was called “Make with Me”

I want to reiterate that I don't like restricting access and I definitely don't like the idea of blocking YouTube.

Since I am unfamiliar with what the Google admin panel allows in the way of customization, I don't really have a ready-made solution to propose, but I do feel strongly that we have to do something or we risk principals and teachers refusing to use the chromebooks in all of the powerful ways they can be used.

Lansing has had three instances of students watching porn and A Hills is having trouble with 7th grade boys doing the same, so we did a quick little test.

I know that IT turned off restrictions because what they restricted were so hit and miss; our screencasts got censured while near naked women running on the beach in slow motion were the top hit on a seemingly innocuous search. That said, we’ve got to get with IT and figure something out

We’ll conclude with some crowdsourcing of people, ideas, and resources.

future of open annotation

what pedagogy

are pros

Readers will invariably use Hypothesis to comment upon – and begin discussions about – the following, and I will synthesize contributions and alter my chat moderation plans accordingly.

thanks Joe Dillon for organizing

Note: I have been inspired by colleagues of mine to think more about tools like hypothesis that let us create small private groups in which we can annotate articles together and then you can choose to make those comments public or not.

Now, checking myself here, I realize that ED677 is a graduate class and that one of the “deals” with school, is that we have safe spaces for talking through complicated ideas without always being subject to public scrutiny. And I also know that educators today are under enormous pressure and public spaces are not always safe and supportive (to say the least).

Most recently I have been learning from two new-to-me online communities of practice – Wattpad for Writers and DeviantArt for Artists. Their online designs and supportive networked ways of working prompt me to continue thinking about the power of open ways of working in such communities.

Great to learn about

Design tasks that end with a public product: In one of the videos in the collection below, educator Kathleen Cushman describes the highly engaging work students do at High Tech High, a school whose curriculum focuses on project-based learning.

When you have constructive feedback to give, follow the same principle and make it specific. Rather than telling a student she “needs to work harder” on her assignments, tell her what to work on. Is neatness an issue? Does she need to read the questions more slowly? Is she doing the advanced math right, but messing up with the basic addition and subtraction? If a student knows what to work on, she will be far more motivated to do that work.

I’m going to give you a sheet of math problems. The first ten are required, the last two are for extra credit. I’m going to give you a sheet of math problems. The first ten should be fairly easy, but I want to see how many of you can do the last two–those are the challenge problems. You guys have learned enough that I think you can solve at least one of them, maybe both.

Consider letting them choose: seating: Could students do some assignments on the floor? In the hall? Or just in different seats? work groups: Some students thrive in groups, while others do better on their own. intake mode: If you want a student to read a particular book, and an audio version is available, you could occasionally make that an option. output mode: For some assignments, it may be possible to have students deliver their response in an audio or video recording, rather than in writing. timing: If students don’t absolutely have to do the same thing at the same time, why not let them choose the order of activities they do?

Isn’t that kind of prep work more in line with worksheet-oriented teaching, where students are doing low-level work that was largely prepared by the teacher? If students are engaged in more long-term, authentic, creative projects, it’s much easier to provide them with choices, because we aren’t constantly trying to provide them with new busywork every day.

If you want something faster, take a look at the 2 x 10 strategy, shared by Angela Watson, which has teachers spend two minutes a day for ten days casually chatting with underperforming students.

Are we passing the buck? Maybe. It’s certainly easier to blame outside forces than it is to make big changes in the way we teach. Unfortunately, even if ALL of the above statements are true, we can’t do anything about those things. The only piece we really have control over is what goes on in our own classrooms.

Through open annotation, students in Games and Learning are appropriating contexts not designed for play – including graduate education, online learning, and asynchronous text-based discussion.

What are the playful qualities of learners’ open and socially networked annotation?

Like writing in the margins of a book, I too appreciate how easily Hypothesis allows me to author and share “my thoughts as I go” – and to do so for a broader audience (anyone who installs the browser extension), and through a greater range of expressive representation (including text, hyperlinks, and embedded media).

A politician whose persuasive stump speech does not rely on the resonance of value-laden memes?

The increasing use of within-text hyperlinks and QR codes deserves consideration in academic journals. “I’ve done my homework, here are the shoulders upon which I stand, but feel free to read on coherently to process the idea I am trying to convey.” The flow of this in typical journalism is both more immediate and more honest.

MLA and APA police still rule, however, even as the Internet increases available and accessible content at exponential rates, and the real need to teach source and content evaluation supersedes the need to teach note-taking and citation.

For substantially all ideas are second hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them any where except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

We watch as solid, slow moving, hermetic traditions of the academy are challenged by the fluid, fast-moving, and crowd-sourced affordances of contemporary digital media.

 I should just put my cynical self aside for the day, and try to pop into some of the conversations when I can (or check out the archives later).

If we want a brighter future for all of our students, regardless of gender and socioeconomics, then we have to be having these discussions, and here, the folks at Digital Learning Day have given over the stage to it.

And I don’t see a Pearson in the mix.

It can feel as if it is government influencing our views of how to reform education. The mission statement about digital learning reads like a passage of the Common Core. Still, there is an entire page of video tours of various schools who are sparking change with digital learning opportunities for students. And I do see some classroom teachers will be part of the webinars.

In the past, I have tried to do digital learning activities on Digital Learning Day, if only to bring my students into the national conversation about learning in the age of technology

The Indian kids crowd the classroom. Many are writing their own poems, short stories and novels. They have read my books. They have read many other books. They look at me with bright eyes and arrogant wonder. They are trying to save their lives. Then there are the sullen and already defeated Indian kids who sit in the back rows and ignore me with theatrical precision. The pages of their notebooks are empty. They carry neither pencil nor pen. They stare out the window. They refuse and resist. "Books," I say to them. "Books," I say. I throw my weight against their locked doors. The door holds. I am smart. I am arrogant. I am lucky. I am trying to save our lives.

At the same time I was seeing the world in paragraphs, I also picked up that Superman comic book. Each panel, complete with picture, dialogue and narrative was a three-dimensional paragraph. In one panel, Superman breaks through a door. His suit is red, blue and yellow. The brown door shatters into many pieces. I look at the narrative above the picture. I cannot read the words, but I assume it tells me that "Superman is breaking down the door." Aloud, I pretend to read the words and say, "Superman is breaking down the door." Words, dialogue, also float out of Superman's mouth. Because he is breaking down the door, I assume he says, "I am breaking down the door." Once again, I pretend to read the words and say aloud, "I am breaking down the door" In this way, I learned to read.

Our house was filled with books. They were stacked in crazy piles in the bathroom, bedrooms and living room. In a fit of unemployment-inspired creative energy, my father built a set of bookshelves and soon filled them with a random assortment of books about the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the Vietnam War and the entire 23-book series of the Apache westerns. My father loved books, and since I loved my father with an aching devotion, I decided to love books as well.

In particular, we don’t know how to educate African-American boys, who, according to the Schott Foundation for Public Education, graduate high school at rates no better than fifty-nine per cent.

Our view of American public education in general has been warped by our knowledge of these failing kids in inner-city and rural schools. In particular, the system as a whole has been described by “reformers” as approaching breakdown. But this is nonsense. There are actually many good schools in the United States—in cities, in suburbs, in rural areas. Pathologizing the system as a whole, reformers insist on drastic reorganization, on drastic methods of teacher accountability.

We can admit that bad teachers, if they can be fairly identified, should be removed. But what can be done to recruit a new cadre of better teachers? Most centrally, we can increase teacher pay and status.

We have to make teaching the way to a decent middle-class life. And that means treating public-school teachers with the respect offered to good private-school teachers—treating them as distinguished members of the community, or at least as life-on-the-line public servants, like members of the military. We also have to face the real problem, which, again, is persistent poverty. If we really want to improve scores and high-school-graduation rates and college readiness and the rest, we have to commit resources to helping poor parents raise their children by providing nutrition and health services, parenting support, a supply of books, and so on.

Last December, Governor Andrew Cuomo established a task force that recommended temporarily banning schools from making decisions about teacher status based on these scores. But, by that time, teachers had been humiliated yet again.

The political atmosphere in the country has become so polarized that spirited teachers—men and women who actually say something—will not survive hostile parents or a disapproving principal without the protection of tenure. Abolishing tenure would create instability and even chaos.

As recent surveys have shown, the high-stakes testing mania has demoralized the profession as whole. It has forced teachers, if they want to survive, to teach to the test, in effect giving up curriculum for test preparation. Trying to score high, some schools gamed the system, or simply cheated on the tests; some abandoned such essentials as the arts, gym, and even recess. Teachers were discouraged from coöperating and from sharing material—this competitive ethos found in school, where coöperation and the sharing of information, particularly in the lower grades, is essential.

A map without a story which engages

In no way does it capture the territory

I think that turning the map into a game board is worth considering–research project as game board.

My students asked me for a map

Humbling

my map, their territory

"Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— We murder to dissect."

I am this corpse. I fear they think me dead, yet I haunt these words.

I haunt these words.  I hear their steps. They pause... But I remain static.

Sarah Gross, a high school teacher and contributor to our blog, did recently using Hypothesis with her senior class as they read the Opinion piece “What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech.”

After Gavin came out as male, he began using the boys’ bathroom at Gloucester High. After seven weeks, angry parents raised the issue with the school board. Their complaints prompted the board to pass a policy requiring students to use the bathroom that corresponds with their “biological gender” and requiring transgender students to use separate, unisex facilities.

Nothing is more painful to the human mind, than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows, and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.

How on earth can our growth be measured? Can pedagogy be sustainable if it does not accept change?

"Colossal rigidity, whether in dinosaurs or dictatorships, has a very poor record of evolutionary survival."

I ask myself questions: "What are the feelings and emotions that lie behind our actions words, as teachers/instructors?" "What are the feelings and emotions that lie behind the words and actions of learners?" "What are the patterns of feelings behind an 'educational system'?" "What patterns of feeling do our rituals conceal?"

"The problem with feeling competent is that we can take on too much," he said. "I ended up with burnout and depression." I listened to him. I nodded.

Textbooks don’t do that. They are too neat. And knowledge is not neat. Students need to know that as early as possible. And textbooks trick them into believing otherwise.

D. That some faculty would take the digital side of a textbook and feel great by just consuming what has been pre-packaged by a publisher and feeling proud of themselves?

career-ladder systems for teachers, strong teacher induction, and consistent, high-quality PD that is led by teachers themselves.

"There is a need to become much clearer about what is and is not good instruction," Jensen said via email. "U.S. districts should—and many do—have clear instructional models. But these should not be so granular that they lead to compliance responses," he added, saying that states and districts need to allow more room for educator expertise.

One case study from the Jensen report offers a glimpse at an elementary school in which the principal acts as the primary substitute teacher so that her faculty could spend time on classroom observation.

An August 2015 study by the teacher-training and advocacy group TNTP questioned the impact of PD activities in U.S. schools and criticized districts for overemphasizing workshops and other trainings that teachers often don't find helpful.

For all these types of models to operate effectively, channels for teacher collaboration are essential, the researchers emphasized. "This is a profound shift for many systems given the efforts to develop precise school performance measures over the past few years," the Jensen report says. "It requires faith and trust in the people making professional judgments."

To that end, advanced Shanghai teachers are turned into researchers, using the classroom to develop and test instructional approaches and interventions, the Zhang report shows.

In addition, Zhang said at the NCEE forum, Shanghai schools aim to embed PD throughout instruction. "Teachers are encouraged to write and reflect so they can figure out why some things work and can share it," he said.

listening to a Tall Tale

Tall Tale story venture we aim to cook up

Ferguson protesters, who faced down tanks, tear gas and assorted forms of military-grade hardware, tasted what many activists suffered throughout the 1950s and 1960s. As these examples show, the fight to end the criminalization of black protest, and of black people more broadly, lies at the heart of African American freedom struggles then and now.

King observed in the “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”:

Between these two incidents I have witnessed and heard innumerable reports from Black parents across the nation of similar encounters.  Black students, usually males, being viewed not as potentially gifted, needing enrichment or more academic challenge, but as disrupters and distractions. So-called professional educators not questioning their own weak classroom practices, lack of differentiated instruction, poor preparation, or implicit biases, but instead wanting these non-compliant Black boys drugged into passivity.

Fighting the impacts of systemic racism and white supremacy in our schools and among teachers.

If you ain't talking about the teacher in the classroom, I ain't listening. Teacher quality matters. Too many in the profession are quick to awfulize students in poverty to rationalize poor results. Better teaching inspires students and gets better results. Better teaching engages students and keeps them in classrooms, rather than the streets. Better teaching is the one thing we never really talk about. Better teaching is the only mechanism we have left.

Do you think Caveparents freaked out when the Caveteens figured out how to make fire for the first time? Probably! But then the caveteens were probably like, “Hey, wild idea, but what if we cracked these weird orbs coming out from under the chickens over the fire and then tried eating them?”

1. The “Why Do Teens Sext? Probably Because They Are So Sad From Meeting All Those Craigslist Killers On Facebook” category. These are the stories that paint teens as reckless drones who are helpless in this new frontier of technology and social media. 2. The “While Other Teens Were Playing Angry Birds, This 14-Year-Old Invented an App That Cures Cancers” category. These stories are inspiring tales of ingenuity but make other teens out to be lazy for, like, just using the internet to unwind by looking at memes.

The second thing RoN does to solve the problem of letting players know where the cutting edge of their competence is is to render the whole matter social.

a sandbox

the very design of the game

Information is always given “just in time” when it can be used and we can see its meaning in terms of effects and actions.

This never happens in RoN or any other good game

failing to be able to learn and enjoy these sorts of games

sorts of learning that goes on in schools

Like all RTS games, RoN involves players learning well over a hundred different commands, each connected to decisions that need to be made, as they move through a myriad of different menus (there are 102 commands on the abridged list that comes printed on a small sheet enclosed with the game). Furthermore, players must operate at top speed if they are to keep up with skilled opponents who are building up as they are. RoN involves a great deal of micro-management and decision-making under time pressure.

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.

Decisions like ending Pell Grants for prisoners, for example.

Programmed instruction doesn’t simply fix the content; it fixes the relationship between learner and instructor (whether machine or human). There is no reciprocity there, for starters. And there’s little opportunity to express oneself outside the pre-ordained — the programmed — design.

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: “A woman must have money, and a room of her own, if she is to write fiction.”

One of the most powerful things that you can do on the Web is to be a node in a network of learners, and to do so most fully and radically, I dare say, you must own your own domain.

The readable, writable, programmable Web is so significant because, in part, it allows us to break from programmed instruction.

All teaching — with or without machines — was viewed by Skinner as reliant on a “contingency of reinforcement.”

I should say that on the average we get about two percent efficiency out of schoolbooks as they are written today

The content could not be “delivered,” because our analysis of political violence had to be constructed and deconstructed and negotiated, with full recognition of those who were in the class and had experienced, enacted forms of political violence — whether those students were in the pen or not. The class — connected through telephony — was networked, as in turn was the learning.

Whether it’s in a textbook or in a video-taped lecture, it’s long been the content that matters most in school. The content is central. It’s what you go to school to be exposed to. Content.

I’d heard some not-too-nice things about the community college statistics instructor, so I decided to take Introduction to Statistics through a correspondence course. I received in the mail a giant box containing the textbook, the worksheets I needed to complete and return to the professor, and half a dozen or so videotapes containing all his lectures.I really had a hard time with the course.

I reflect on what I can do... I return to the question of mentoring. I return to the question of wide ranging networks. I return to the question of a more 'hands on approach' to language learning. I return to the importance of communication. I return to the importance of the diverse messages necessary to communicate. I return to the question of who such communication should be most effectively targeted to. I return to Daniel Bassill and his Tutor Mentor Program in Chicago. I am just an English teacher. I am not just an English teacher... I repeat it to myself, it doesn't always help.

I conclude that I do not want to be Pasi Sahlberg if I have to cite PISA. Pasi Sahlberg is not the change I am looking for. I return to conversations between Daniel Bassill, Terry Elliott and myself.

I keep having to accept that I am not 'just an English teacher', I am not 'just a teacher'. It is an insidious message that repeats itself: "But you're you, you're hopeless, you know you are...you've got no time, mind your own business....you're just a bloody English teacher."

Students are able to think about their own thinking and the thinking of their peers.Students engage in deeper thought and comprehension after a blend of verbal, in-person communication and typing/writing that uses technology as portal for students to talk.Sometimes technology comes before verbal and sometimes verbal comes before technology.Students are “heard.”Students go beyond the classroom walls both to get input for learning and to demonstrate/share learning and thinking.Teachers learn from students, students learn from students, and students learn from teachers and other adults.All students are able to share their learning.Tech use supports students in talking through their thinking for an audience.Tech use supports what students are learning rather than usage being the end goal itself.

But which uses of technology in schools support young people’s development better than, say, using a pencil? And which are, in fact, worse than a pencil?

Smart Tech Use for EquityThe Smart Tech Use for Equity participants are K-12 teachers of science, math, special education and English (including English as another language). In 2014-15, 10 founding teachers each explored one tech use with their students, documented the effects and shared their learning with other teachers. The same process is underway for 2015-16. (You can watch videos about their work here.)

Cardiovascular exercise is also critical. When the heart muscles pump faster, they release a peptide believed to help produce se-rotonin. That means considering a brisk walk before an afternoon meeting — or better yet, walk and talk. Steve Jobs regularly held “walking” meetings. Mark Zuckerberg does too. The serotonin exercise produces not only will make a person more creative and productive but it also improves the quality of sleep, creating a positive cycle all around.

We need translation zones where there’s sharing of power between interest-driven, peer-driven, and institution-driven imperatives. The Chicago YOUmedia learning lab, as well as others that are opening up around the country, are examples of experiments in this vein.

In our New Media Literacies work, we have an activity where we ask students to map their identities as readers, to identify the many different things they read and write and the roles they play in their lives – from menus and cereal boxes to magazines and websites (Jenkins, Reilly, and Mehta, 2013). We’ve had any number of students complete the activity and come to the realization that, while schools have long classified them as not very good readers, they read all the time. Reading is a key part of their lives, but they simply don’t engage in the kinds of reading that schools value. They don’t read the right things or in the right way.

Teenagers tell me that they’ve been told that Wikipedia is bad while Google is good. When I push them on this, I find that they’re often not sure exactly what this means. But they’ve been taught to read certain platforms as trustworthy and to eschew others, with no critical apparatus to understand why. I’m saddened by the low level of computational and media literacy out there and the broad refusal to engage with these issues. It’s easier to be afraid of technology and media than to engage critically with it.

What does it mean to be literate in an environment where information isn’t just at your fingertips but flooding your senses?

Rather, we should think about literacy as involving the capacity to engage with networked publics, to share what you write, and to receive feedback from some kind of larger community. In that sense, we were trying to move literacy from the capacity to produce and consume information to the capacity to participate in some larger social system. This expanded conception of literacy brings new kinds of ethical expectations – a greater sense of accountability for the information we produce and share with others given the impact of our communication practices on the people around u

In the Digital Youth study we found that most young people were going online to hang out with friends in ways that were not particularly focused on academic or expertise-oriented learning. A significant number did use online networks to geek out in areas of interest, such as gaming or fandom, and many of these groups were intergenerational in composition. But only a very small handful of resourceful young people were taking their community-based learning and connecting it to in-school, civic, or career-relevant settings. I realized it wasn’t enough simply to celebrate the cool things that kids were creating and learning in their affinity networks if we wanted to make these activities matter for education and other forms of opportunity.

And because in the spirit of participatory culture – a key feature of many games, and a core commitment of this course – this blog is a forum inviting others interested in games and learning to connect with us, participate, and build shared knowledge. Welcome!

so download the Hypothesis browser extension

course’s first cycle

know via Twitter and the hashtag #ILT5320.

The hashtag went viral and sparked a broader dialogue about diversity in children’s literature. I found this hashtag valuable not only because it alerted me to an egregious example of a culturally insensitive text that helps sustain systemic racism, but also because it provided me with a wealth of reading to help me go beyond a single text and think about the larger civic issue of the lack of diverse authors/perspectives in this genre.

Considering that knowledge is one of the first steps toward civic engagement, shouldn’t we consider Twitter a valuable addition to our civic toolkit?

But most of all, I love Twitter because of its ability to bring stories to light from around the country (and around the world) that spark social and political dialogue.

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season."