I’ve yet to do the voicethread assignment for i’m waiting to see if that is available now on our school server which is considerably faster than mine at home. In the past it was blocked in some way or other, so that’s being checked and i hope to do the voicethread soon.
Before getting into the blog questions that Shelley posed, i wanted to mention a couple of things that i found really interesting, and figure no one will read to the end of this blather of a blog, so i’m putting it in here.
One of the nifty things about the course is simply being introduced to the Web 2.0 notion as a notion. I already had done various collaborative things, but i didn’t know that this was somehow, well, as Shelley so nicely introduced, a Thing! To name it allowed the disciplined exploration of parts and possibilities.
Remarkably as well in several Tech-Ed journals in April the Web 2.0 concept was featured, so there was much to read on about. In the May Scientific American there is a fine article, with further internet sites to explore, about the impact of Web 2.0 on scientific research. The Web was created, as far as i can recall, precisely to promote this scientific model of the free exchange of information and collaborative research, evaluation, and more.
Instead, of course, we’ve got YouTube. This week Rushworth Kidder in his posting on his Ethics Newsline as The YouTube Illusion poses varieties of challenges to the explosion of information and the inability to keep up with it. His view of things seems to me to miss some of the possibilities and realities of Web 2.0, but his view is a popular one and one i think is worth considering. His interest in the ethical dimensions of Web 2.0 as one amongst many internet, well, Things, is something i like and commend to consider, be in conversation with.
But back to the Scientific American article which is really more interesting to me. The brief overview is that some, and more, scientists are posting raw data as it happens, considers of possible theories, etc. for others to see and comment on, to take part in. This is the sort of thing that happens, ideally, in a common laboratory or in an international community of scientists working on some common problem. On the other hand, to put stuff “out there” is to invite the unscrupulous, rewarded by patents, papers, academic positions, grant money, etc., to steal and claim these ideas and data as their own. In spite of that obvious danger, Science 2.0 sites are expanding and are, according to the article, more productive than any other way of scientific collaboration.
The article is interesting in itself, but it reflects back questions about the ways of Web 2.0 in education, it seems. Our students, for the most part, are not at work on original research, whether in Faulker or fractals or fusion. To note the few who are doesn’t change the fact that most aren’t. So, the goal is not original thinking. I dealt with this with my AP U.S. History students today who are anxiously preparing for the AP exam scheduled for Friday. I told them several things about the exam, but also that relying on wit or cleverness was not a good strategy. Nor flowery or elegant language. Nor original ideas that go off in radical ways from the posed question that is to direct the thesis. The test in essays is testing the ability to conform to and work within the historical method as imagined by the AP U.S. History folks. Those are dire restrictions, and one of my most creative and interested students said, “Mr. McCann, you’re killing me!” This is a student whose energy rose up again when i said that the end of the year Final Exam might be to do an interpretive dance expressing the essence of three Presidents. This is a student who asked earlier in the year, trying to get a fix on remembering vividly Presidents, “What sort of soup would James Polk be?” I don’t much like the AP Exams because they drive students like this to doubt their own ways of enacting and loving History. She said that she has always loved history, and thought she knew it, but now she’s afraid she doesn’t. That’s not what AP should be for, nor high school classes. I’m hoping to cheer her own further than the dire shadow of the exam, for she loves our history and making history much more than any exam could register.
To what extent do school and grades and competition to get into college, to get the Hope Scholarship, drive students into worrying about collaboration, about how the single student will be able to gain recognition from collaborative work? The AP U.S. History exam is not a test or evaluation or opportunity for collaborative work. The task of writing together in a joint blog a DBQ essay is something that is most useful for students to learn their own strengths and weaknesses, to learn from one another, to learn how actual historians learn and transform our historical understanding — but that’s not on the AP U.S. History test! Students, and their teachers, are put in a double-bind here.
And it’s the same double-bind that scientists are put in when deciding whether to enter the Science 2.0 world or not. What is the reward, the accreditation, the assessment, the congratulations for work in this way? Does someone else run off with a prior registered trademark, a possession out of the collaborative work of many into singular seizing hands? Does the one who hated collaborative projects get the grade and the Hope Scholarship and college acceptances, while the collaborative work of other students has a more diluted grade? Or do we grade precisely FOR the collaborative element? And is that in the Lakeview Mission Statement and more? The school is not up and running on a Web 2.0 basis, and is in the same sort of position as scientists considering Science 2.0. Do the parents of private school students want to pay big bucks so that their own singular children can “collaborate”? This is something that we’re way unclear on, even as to what that means.
The Scientific American article brings some of these issues into focus from a different angle and is useful to consider, to help me think better about the evaluation of these Web 2.0 educational tools and means. In the article Bill Hooker, a cancer researcher, is quoted as saying, “To me, opening up my lab notebook means giving people a window into what I’m doing every day. That’s an immense leap forward in clarity. In a paper, I can see what you’ve done. But i don’t know how many things you tried that didn’t work. It’s those little details that become clear with an open (online) notebook but are obscured by every other communication mechanism we have. It makes science more efficient.”
I love that from Hooker. I do think that open collaboration makes learning and life itself more efficient. I know i’m much more efficient in living more fully with the collaboration, i.e., mutual love and integration and learning from each other, of my wife, and then of my children, and with my students, and with my puppies. And more. And what is true here is that it is messier to live this way (from a walk with puppies in a field yesterday we had adventures with ticks last night), but it certainly is a more awake, aware, appreciative way of living. It’s the same thing that, for me as an Episcopal priest as well as a teacher, the doctrine of the Trinity is all about. A God getting singular top marks as God is simply not the Biblical God at all. The Biblical God fumes and frets and fusticates, and then fails alone with the world and the people he loves, and gathers up into learning again, with God learning anew as well as the world and people. The Bible is a great Web 2.0 document, after all.
Again, school is laggardly to catch up with this ambition of learning collaboratively. And that’s part of the frustration, too, of really entering into this Web 2.0 process. That what is to be collaborative and communion learning can turn instead into a loneliness in the midst of authorized school.
Web 2.0 is a radical opening for learning all around. In at least some private schools, and perhaps most private schools at least some, the mission of the school is to protect the students from “learning all around”. The mere revolutionary means of connection changes the curriculum — or at least challenges the curriculum. Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium Is the Message” has resurrected relevance here to consider, and it’s one that has not made its way back into curriculum again. In some real ways Web 2.0 is not about “tools” or “Things”, it’s really about ways of learning together, and transformations in different ways.
For me the transformative ways of learning i’ve known and loved and keep learning from include the doctrine of the Trinity, the Biblical story, Karl Marx, Poetry, Thomas Merton, on and on — just as the AP U.S. History folks are saying now that they realize their tests are bogus and so are moving in a half-a-dozen years to what they now think might be a better test of historical thinking in U.S. students and society — we’ll see what they really do. In the meantime, of course, they keep giving their old tests and raking in the money. It’s dreary times in AP land, telling students that the AP folks say they know they have been goofus and irrelevant for real historical studies, but it takes them, corporate folks with things to sell, a half-dozen years to “re-tool”. And in the meantime, good luck to you, cannon-fodder, sales. That schools turn to such to validate their curriculum is, i think, an abomination and a cheat. And opportunities for teaching in a collaborative way wither while we wait for AP to re-tool to make yet more money. Ugh! All this is reflected in the Scientific American article in various ways. It’s good to have different angles to consider 2.0 use, ambition, risk — and remembering that learning is ever a risk, not an investment, but a risk.
Shelley’s diligent work and giving into all this course, and the one ahead and on, is an example of reckless risk given into the love of learning, a community of learning, an enormous gift of time to help and inspire the Luddite like me to take her hand and risk trying this, and then this, and…..well, all the way to this time.
Shelley’s already off into the next course, leaving us behind, us sputtering and figuring and muddling to the end. And i guess that’s what i’ll really miss most. I’ll keep doing this and that in Web 2.0 stuff, and from connects i’ve made with students, with friends, with my daughter, new Web 2.0 stuff keeps coming up to try, experiment with, see what happens. I’ve not had time, writhing along in some Jacob’s wrestling with the angel in each Thing, and then going limping on, to be in touch with all of the folks of this class company. All that, i suppose, will end with the end of the class. And an end of connection with Shelley, too, which i’m sorry to accept, but so it goes.
At the beginning of things the James Stephens’s tale of Fionn Mac Cumhail saying that the Best Music in the World is The Music of What Happens”, but at the end of times i find good company in Kurt Vonnegut’s “So It Goes….”, his wry blessing. And all of that is Web 2.0, too, in feeling and understanding beginning and endings in company, in collaboration, in a remembering, just like we all remember in early years, faced with a test in middle school, perhaps, and what did Bottom become in his dream, in his transformation, in stumbling into the world of Web 2.0?
Cheers and on….whatever happens
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