Drinking or Pouring

One of the panelists at the keynote on the last day of SITE made a really interesting remark. He said (in my own words), your perspective about the glass being half empty or half full depends on whether you're drinking or pouring. I don't know if he meant for this remark to be poignant, but I have really been thinking about it a lot. I guess the difference, to me, comes down between giving and receiving. If a person spends a lot of their time receiving and expecting from others, circumstances would naturally be viewed as falling short of his or her needs and expectations. I have known quite a few people like this, and honestly, I have been this person on many occasions. When your focus is on what you are (or aren't) getting, there will always be something missing.

On the other hand, people who spend more of their time, talents and energy giving tend to see the world in terms of what they can give and be for others. It makes sense that this sort of person would not spend a whole of time thinking about what he or she is not getting.

It seems the common view is that perspective is the starting place. A person has his or her worldview, and they act based on that perspective. But I'm starting to think that actions, whether focused on helping others or yourself, influence perspective, and this makes the daunting task of improving a pretty self-centered worldview not so impossible. A very wise person once said, "If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you'll find both yourself and me." I'm glad to have been reminded of that in the most unlikely of places.

TPACK Traction

I am listening to a presentation about assessing the TPACK (Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge) of teachers and faculty. As much as I have read about TPACK, I must confess I am still getting my head around it. Both in terms of research and implementation. Each of these presentations has been very helpful for me in gaining traction in this understanding. I have also been challenged to reflect on my own teaching and TPACK.

The more I think about TPACK, I compare it to tightening the lug nuts on a tire: the more you tighten one lug nut, it will create slack in the others. If you want to really tighten all of the lug nuts, you need to tighten each of them a little at a time. You rotate between the lug nuts until all of them are tight. The same is true of TPACK. It's hard to develop all three knowledge domains at once. As a teacher, you might work on one of the knowledge domains, wrestle with it, implement something related to that knowledge domain, reflect on it and then look at it in terms of the other knowledge domains. For example, the more I learn about a content area, the more I will think about teaching strategies to transform that content into learning experiences, and the more I will think about tools to use as part of the instruction, which will make me revisit instructional strategies, which might make me see the content in new ways and consider new ways of representing it.

Just some random thoughts, but something I probably wouldn't have thought about were I not sitting in these conference presentations. Go SITE!

Technology and Priorities

I am at the SITE conference in San Diego, and after 1.5 days of presentations I have heard one theme emerge above all others. This theme can be reduced to one question, "Why do students, who use technology in almost every aspect of their lives, seem so clueless when it comes to using it in their teaching and learning?" You may have seen versions of this conversation framed in other ways: digital natives vs. digital immigrants, 21st Century learning, Content-creators, Millennial Students, etc. The assumption on the part of teacher educators is that students who love technology in certain areas of their lives should love it in their learning and teaching. I would like to suggest a radical idea: teens and college students don't love technology. They love what they can do with technology, which is to address their priorities and motivations. Take technology out of the picture, and this is what I know about college students:

• They like to have fun
• They are more likely to listen to their friends than their parents or professors
• They like to be entertained
• They are confronted with a lot of information that has challenged their worldview, and they are trying to make sense of it all
• They view their classes as something they have to do to a) stay in college and be with their friends and b) graduate and move on to the next phase of their lives

So, why do students know so much about certain technologies yet know so little about other types of technology (e.g., educational/learning technology)? The technologies they know and use help them address their priorities, and as sad as it may seem, being a life-long learner is not a priority for them at this stage in their lives.

I spend a lot of time talking to teacher candidates about knowing their students and meeting where they are in their skills, abilities and prior knowledge. As a teacher educator, I must do the same with my students. I need to understand their priorities and motivations, and meet them where they are.

The Powerlessness of Some Stories

I am still thinking about stories, memory and learning. As I wrote earlier, with a quick scan down the list of former students I can recall the digital story each one of them created for my class. I have had former students tell me the same thing. They can remember the stories created by their classmates, recalling some of the most amazing details. When I read the names of my students, I could hear their voices, see the images in my head, remember the anecdotes they shared, and in some cases, associate the music they included as part of their projects. This made me think of another project I was involved in while I was teaching these undergraduate classes. I spent the better part of two years of my life working with teachers and helping they and their students create short historical documentaries by mashing up archival material and user-generated content. The movies ranged from the Harlem Renaissance to the Great Migration, to the causes and effects of the Civil War. I worked with about a half-dozen teachers and approximately 150 students. I didn't spend as much time in those classrooms as I did with my preservice teachers, but I did spend enough time with them that when I scan the list of students from each class I can place a face with the name. Over the  course of 3 very intense projects, I helped them make about 150 movies, give or take a few students who missed too much school or didn't use their time wisely.

Oddly, I could remember very little about the movies they created, even though they shared many similarities with the movies created by the preservice teachers. In contrast, I helped over 200 preservice teachers create digital stories over a 4-year span and I can remember every single story. As another contrast, the quality and form of the movies was quite different. This is not meant to be a knock on 6th graders, but undergraduates at the University of Virginia knew a little more about storytelling and expression than the 12-13 year olds I was working with. Here are some of the notable differences in their projects:

6th Graders	Preservice Teachers
Chose images from a pool hand-picked by teacher	Took or found their own images
Most of the stories used the same images	Every story was completely unique
Narrative was an expository essay	Narrative was a story
Most of the narratives covered the exact same main points (convergent coverage of the topic)	Narratives were totally unique (divergent coverage of the topic)
Stories did not have music	Stories had music
Stories reflected what the teacher told them they had to remember	Stories reflected personal learning

I know this is probably not a complete list, but this is what I was able to come up with after viewing a few of each type of story. Honestly, the 6th grade movies all sounded and looked the same. Yes, the topics were covered in different order, there was slight variation on the images used and the narrative was worded differently, but for the most part they were identical. Kind of like Kevin Costner movies.

This is an interesting topic to me, and I plan on covering it more in the future. I am leaving tomorrow for SITE, and I hope to have some good conversations about digital storytelling and other tech-related teaching strategies.

The Power of Stories

I have recently been reading (and re-reading) some interviews I conducted with former teacher education students at the University of Virginia. The purpose of the interviews was to ask each person, who also happens to be in his or her first year of teaching, which aspects of their educational technology coursework they are using now that they are full-time teachers. The information obtained from these interviews has been fascinating, but what is even more amazing is how much they remember from the Digital Storytelling project we did. Most of these teachers were in different sections of my class and made their digital stories about various (sometimes random) topics. Some of them did creative writing, while others told personal stories. Some of the movies were based on a topic from the school curriculum, while other themes will likely NEVER find their way into a textbook or unit of study. I always made a big deal about these movies. I would put them all into one, long movie and added my own silly introduction and somewhat sentimental/inspiring conclusion. We brought in food and generally had a lot of fun watching everyone's story. It was always a great way to end the semester.

As I was reading through one of the interview scripts, it dawned on me that I actually remembered the movie made by every participant in my study (n=8). So, as an experiment I went back and looked at every class list from every ed. tech. class I taught at UVa. Sure enough, I could recall what every single person's movie was about, just from reading each name! Stories about fathers who immigrated from other countries, stories of working with special needs students, stories told from a dog's perspective, stories about stuffed animals that wandered away from their class on a field trip and discovered the UVa Grounds in the process. Stories using scanned photographs, stories that were hand-drawn, stories using images from a memorable experience, stories with roommates posing as the characters in the story. I was amazed and was briefly lost in the symphony of stories washing over my memory. I remember pitching digital storytelling as a great activity to engage students in writing, but it's now clear to me that the real power of stories was completely lost on me at the time. People connect, identify, place themselves in, and yes, even remember stories.

Has anyone else experienced this power in their own use of stories in the classroom?

Oh, be careful little CV what you say

A colleague just passed this CV along to me, which is quite creatively displayed in Google Maps. I think this a good example of how one can mix new media (interactive map) with an existing purpose (CV) and create a completely unique message. I will definitely be showing this to my students, both as an example of an innovative use of media and as a nonexample for how to write for an intended audience. Let me qualify my impending rant with this statement: I am in academia, not in advertising or copy writing, so the standards and expectations for a CV may differ quite a bit between the two worlds. Furthermore, the owner of this CV is a professional writer and undoubtedly knows more about his audience than I do.

That said, I have three main observations about his CV, which I think would be great conversation starters for graduating seniors or grad students. First, how casual is too casual for a CV? I think I am just too accustomed to the stuffy academic CV. The overall tone of this CV is quite casual and resembles something you might read on Facebook or a blog. Should style change with the medium? Would a more formal tone undermine the affordances of the interactive map?

Second, he does a pretty good job of focusing on the high points of his career, but he also commits some major job interview no-nos: talking about goofing off in college, bashing (or at least making fun of) a former boss and mentioning dissatisfaction with an old job. I have sat on several committees where we interviewed teachers for an open position, and I was always able to tell what kind of colleague the person would be just based on what he or she said about former students, principals, schools and districts. If a former principal or colleagues were described as "horrible," chances are he or she would find something horrible about future colleagues and principals. I was always "coached" to be very positive about former work environments and be selective in what I said about colleagues and bosses. In Ed's defense, he doesn't say anything really scathing and he is much more positive than negative in his descriptions of former employers.

Finally, some of his humor is a little misdirected. Considering the recent earthquake in Chile, the comment about Chilean geography may come across as insensitive. I am not an overly sensitive person, and I was immediately struck with how untimely and inappropriate this was. As a person who knows a thing or two about digital media, I know it won't take very long to move that little pin to a different place on the map.

Overall, I think this is pretty cool and I hope it ultimately leads to a job. Best of luck, Ed!

Live from the Illinois Computing Educators conference

My day started at 4:30 a.m. today, when I woke up to leave for the Illinois Computing Educators conference in St. Charles, IL (a suburb of Chicago). I was able to catch up on my This American Life podcasts on the way up, which is always a lot of fun. I really had no idea what to expect at this conference, and when I pulled into the parking lot I quickly learned this was a much bigger deal than I had planned on. I started to feel quite sheepish about my dinky little poster in the back of the car. When I finally got checked in and arrived in the room for the poster session, I was even more embarrassed. On one side of me was a massive flat screen TV at one of the booths, and on the other side was a group of 5 laptops and a projector. As the start time got closer, I felt a lot better as I noticed some more "normal" posters like mine.

I had some really good conversations with several people, showing them PrimaryAccess Storyboard and talking about different teaching strategies with primary sources. I ran out of brochures, which is a good thing, soI had to pull out some old business cards to hand otu to people interested in using the tool. One of the really amazing things about poster sessions like this is hearing from teachers how they would use the tool in their classroom. I've used it with some teachers in pretty much the same way each time, but I heard of some very interesting ideas from other teachers that I will have to think about and test out with my own students.

I will definitely be attending ICE again, and this was a great kickoff to the conference season.

Research and Evidence

From early on in my doctoral studies, I gravitated toward research that had practical implications. I am not suggesting that survey research is not practical, but for the most part it really didn't interest me that much. I was far more interested in studies that measured things that matter to teachers and students: time on task, engagement with the instruction, student artifacts and learning. As a teacher, these were the things that interested me. I had to be sensitive to each student as an individual and the different factors that directly influenced their lives, but I felt more compelled to make my classroom as exciting as possible than I did to try to change their lives at home or their attitudes toward school. This is just where I chose to put my time and energy. So, when I see research that is really creative, unique or practical, I am suddenly interested. There are two such studies that I find fascinating. The first is a study about the influence of success or failure on perception. This could have easily been done with a research instrument (survey, questionnaire, etc.), but these researchers chose to measure the influence of success or failure (in this case, kicking field goals) by having participants adjust a miniature goal post to the size they thought was to scale after they had just attempted 10 field goals. People who kicked too low routinely adjusted the mini goal post too high; people who kicked wide right or left would judge the distance between the goal posts to be more narrow than they really are. Even more surprising, the more field goals a person made, the wider they adjusted the goal posts. It's fascinating to think that people standing side-by-side, based on their success at kicking field goals, were actually not looking at the same object. I really like this study because it accurately reflects how people might actually perceive objects or experiences with which they have had past success or failure. I used to notice something similar with my students in regard to reading ability. Those who struggled with reading were more likely to perceive words with a lot of letters as harder. I found them skipping past or mumbling long words, even if the words weren't really that hard to read (e.g., doorstop). I have no formal data, just my own experience, to back this up, but based on the findings of the field goal study it makes sense that this phenomenon would apply to other areas of life.

The second study, if one can call it that, is based on a series of VW commercials. The premise is that people will be more likely to do otherwise mundane or bothersome activities if they are made to be fun. You need to watch the videos to see what I am talking about. What I find interesting is the way they measure the influence of "fun" on the desired behavior: the number of people using a recycling  bin, number of people using the stairs and the weight of the trash in a garbage can. Each of these outcomes measure exactly what the fun was meant to increase. No surveys or other validated instruments; just an increase in the thing that is meant to be increased.

Of course, student outcomes aren't as tidy as the number of people to use the stairs instead of the escalator in a 24-hour period. Concepts such as "understanding," "effort," and "engagement" are really hard to define, thus, are hard to measure. But there are some things that teachers would like see more of from their students that can be measured: time on task, attention to detail, and higher-order thinking. These two studies have breathed a little life into my interest in student outcomes and classroom-based research. They are innovative, creative and, at least to the people who are interested in perception or increasing civic-minded behavior, relevant. Research should be, if nothing else, relevant.

I can still hear the words of two of my professors ...

Professor A: By the time you leave my class, I want you all to be from Missouri. Why Missouri? Because it's the Show-Me State, and if you make claims based on your research, you need to show me. Your data should show me something.

Professor B: If something exists, then it exists in some amount and can, therefore, be measured.

I didn't realize this at the time, but these have become words to live by.

Voice in the Academy

I recently was asked by a relative over the Thanksgiving break about the aspects of working at a university that I found most surprising. What he was really asking was, "What weren't you prepared for?" As someone who had the good fortune to be involved in a graduate program with a considerable amount of transparency, I thought I was well prepared for the realities of being a tenure-track faculty member at a university. I will not go into details, but trust me when I say I was not nearly as prepared as I thought I was. During my four years at UVA, I taught between 1-3 courses each semester, and this doesn't count my teaching experience in my Master's program or my 8 years of teaching public school. This gave me an unbelievable head start in terms of learning the ropes of course planning, teaching and dealing with students. I had written several syllabi from scratch, crafted many, many projects and tests, and heard just about every excuse under the sun from students. Even so, I had a ton to learn this semester as I taught two courses for the first time in a new university.

I left class last night with a sinking feeling that I had failed as a teacher this semester, and I was obsessed with the fact that two of my biggest projects were just not planned out very well. As I skimmed blogs in my reader this morning, I ran across this post by Female Science Professor (yes, that is her Web identity). In general, her blog has quickly risen near the top of my favorites because of her insight, wisdom and humor. On more than one occasion, she has addressed topics similar to things I was struggling with, and today that was the case. I have no idea how my evaluations will turn out, but it doesn't really matter because I have always been harsher on myself than my students or colleagues. Anyway, the main points I took away from this post are that A) planning and teaching a new course for the first time is hard, and B) it takes 1-2 semesters to feel comfortable with it. I have already jotted down some changes I plan on making next semester, fearing that if I didn't do this I would get back in January and forget what didn't go so well.

This brings up my last point, which is that to succeed in any kind of teaching profession, a person has to be reflective. We constantly have to think about our craft and thoughtfully consider the feedback we get from other people.  I gave a mid-semester evaluation in my classes, which helped me shift things around a little before the semester completely got away from me. I also plan on recruiting some colleagues to evaluate my course by sitting in on a couple of sessions, looking at my course materials and maybe even reading my course evaluations. This will require a high degree of humility if in fact my evaluations come back less than stellar, but I think this will be beneficial in the long run.

Similar to this, I recently got accepted to present at a conference. I was very excited to get this news, but I was shocked when I read the reviewers' comments. They absolutely tore my paper apart. It was borderline humiliating, but as I thought about it, I realized it was the best possible scenario. Had I gotten accepted with no real feedback, I might have tried to submit these findings to a journal and been devastated to find out they weren't as glorious as I originally thought (or was led to believe). But I got the best of both worlds: I got into the conference AND got blistering feedback. So, now I have a roadmap for how to make my paper even better.

My teaching is  the same in this regard. Critical feedback might just be what I need to hear in order to grow and continually develop my craft.

Next stop ... Hollywood

Now Deion Sanders and I have one thing in common ... we're both Primetime! I was recently interviewed for a news story about the shortage of male teachers in elementary schools. It turned out pretty good, and thankfully I made enough intelligible comments to get included in the story at all. You can watch the news story below.