I want to caution that the goal here is not to come up with a common or agreed upon list between us. It’s great to work on your ideas here, but this is not really the key forum.

The key forum is our schools. We need to have these discussions there, among the educators who need to work collectively to teach those lessons. I am not saying that they should or should not be decided upon democratically, as that is an issue for another day. Rather, I am saying that they need to be discussed and explored among the educators.

Why? Why is that so important?

First, we need to really work on our understanding of these goals, their limits, the way they fit together (or not), what they imply for our subjects and/grade levels. Others can help us to examine our own understanding in ways that are quite difficult to do by ourselves. If we are going to plan towards them or figure out what tools we might use to support them or any of the rest, we need to do more than just come up with lists. We need to work on our understanding of them for our work contexts.

Next, it is really easy to loose sight of our bigger goals, amid all the crap and business and external forces and mandates. We shouldn’t just be thinking about them during them summer months, but rather during all the months. Keeping them as a topic of conversation between educations helps us to keep them on our minds.

Last, none of us can this alone. We only have the kids for an hour or five a day. There are other teachers/periods and other years. If we do not work towards the same larger lessons together, we shall surely hang separately. (Wait, that’s not the expression…) The English teachers and the math teachers must understand that they have common goals, along with the gym teachers and all the rest. Sure, there are different focus, but I offer that every one of the larger lessons — whatever they may be — can be taught across the disciplines. For example communication is a central element of math (with its own accepts language for communicating mathematical ideas and work) and science (what else is a lab write up/report). Problem solving is a central idea of literature, as in trying to unlock the meaning(s) of a poem. And really making the larger lessons stick — I like Meier’s label of Habits of Mind because it suggests more than merely the ability to use them — take years of scaffolding, layering and encouraging.

So, whatever you think the larger lessons might be, I strongly encourage your to talk with your colleagues about them. Like so many other attempts to change our schools, you can turn with a bunch of willing colleagues and expand out later. But don’t just keep your answers to yourself. You’ll understand them better with the help of others, and do more for the kids.

This was said further down in the thread but I couldn’t reply there because of the nesting levels restriction so will reply here instead

Being clear about what is important to teach is fundamental to this whole discussion. In this respect I’m in agreement with ceolaf. The best expression I have seen of this comes from alan kay in what he describes as the non universals. I’ve attempted to summarise some of this here:
http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com/nonUniversals

But my point about climate change is that it’s coming home to roost in this century, if we can somewhat believe the IPCC and Stockholm, etc, in ways that could very well make the last seem a Disney story. And that’s a future I won’t be alive to see.

Anyway, I’ve seriously got to stop. We’re probably hijacking this thread too much anyway.

1. I’m not sure anybody is posing teachers and tech, or f2f and virtual discussions, as mutually exclusive. We’re probably all thinking more along the lines of hybrid instead of either/or models.

So I ain’t about to argue against talking and facilitating discussions.

2. I read publishers’ blogs and websites, and the gist I’m getting is that book publishing is hedging its bets now to publish sure sellers – can you say (or gasp) “Sarah Palin autobiography”? – and reject most of the rest.

I won’t claim to be an expert on the magazine industry, tho’ I see lots of talk of titles folding.

Regardless, they’re declining and the other is rising. The main point.

3. Letters to the editor in most papers are so poor, I shudder to think of the hundreds of rejects. But there’s a value to publishing the 300 online, and “voting them up” so the quality rises. I _do_ read threads quite often when I know the readership is sharp.

And I’m a bit wary of letting media controllers “cull the crap” for me. Gatekeepers cull more than that. Think the NYTimes laying on the wire-tapping story until after the 2004 elections.

We could go on and on, but I’m moving this week. I’ll end by saying I respect and *agree* that tech fetishism can be misguided; but so can its opposite. You can build better stuff with better tools, but only if the thing you’re aiming to build is one of quality instead of crap.

Both tools and value fit in the equation.

I think you — and others — make assumptions about these “lasting lessons.” First, many people outside of education — and Bill Gates is a great example of this — believe that they are primarily deal with transmission of knowledge. I say “Poppycock!” The kids forget the atomic number of nitrogen, the difference between the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet, the meaning of CPCTC and so much more. We, as educators, are not focused on mere knowledge — at least I hope not.

Maybe we focus on skills, like thinking skills. Perhaps aptitudes (i.e. let’s make them smarter). I like Meier & Sizer’s “habits of mind.” They encompass more, and really are the building block to make a life out of.

>Call me crazy, but I think there are a few skills and knowledge-bases
>unique to the 21st century, and that need considerably more attention
>in schools.
>
>Climate change is one. How to study it, how to evaluate other studies of
>it, how to adapt to it in daily life, how to innovate against it, how to
>collaborate to avoid the inevitable conflicts it will cause (and is already
>causing).

OK. You’re crazy. I mean REALLY crazy. Climate change has been going on for much longer than nine years. We teach students to understand it the same way that we taught students to understand deforestation 25 years ago, the same way we taught them to understand electricity 50 years ago. We teach them to collaborate, just as kindergarten teachers have been teaching it for over 100 years.

You think that the tools, skills, aptitudes and habits of mind that we need to teach our students to they can deal with climate change are different than what we were supposed to be teaching all along? Really? They are “unique to the 21st century”? Yeah, you’re crazy.

Do we need to do a better job of teaching science? Of course we do! But that’s not because we are in the 21st century. Rather, it is because we didn’t go a good enough job in the 20th century for the 20th century. The baby-boomers don’t understand evolution, nor do their children. They don’t understand climate change, nor do their children. We sucked as teaching science — the method, the rigor, the approach, the discipline of science — last century and look at where it got us! Now, we’ve got to clean up the old problems — not new problems — because we allowed them to fester.

If we were teaching history/social studies properly, adults would better understand how changes over here can impact people over there, often quite disproportionately. Maybe we wouldn’t have people with microphones saying that losing 5% of global GDP ain’t so bad — because they’d understand that that the hits are going to be spread evenly and certainly aren’t hit as hard the people nations who might be able to afford it. Interconnectedness of peoples, nations, trade, resources, all of that stuff? We’ve not taught it well in the past, when it was already what we were supposed to be teaching.

These are not new ideas. The tools that our schools might give students that they can address climate change are not new. Not even close to new.

Re: Linearity, Isolation and interactivity

I think you’ve got these ideas confused. Footnotes and the rest address linearity and potentially explicitly show how a piece is not isolated. You are talking about quite a different point, which is interactivity.

Talking to a footnote, you are right, is quite limited. If done literally, it doesn’t last and anyone who hears you might look at you funny. If done in writing, others might not see it, or might complain about defacing the book. (There’s real debate about writing in books. Some thing that it is part of reading, and some think that it is inappropriate.)

I think that hypertextual media is really great. I command-click on links all the f-in’ time. I have no problem with them. Their convenience does not mean, however, that they are the only way to do it. And I would much rather focus with students on the lessons of how to understand the non-hyperlinked connections — especially online when it is so easy to forget about the implied or assumed connections — than the obvious hyperlinked one. But you’re an English/History teacher, so you know how important those lessons are, right?

As for letters to the editor vs. comments on HuffPo? Well, you think that there are more comments than letters? You’re probably wrong. The advantage with the old-fashioned newspaper is that they culled out the “crap” (as you called it/them), and printed a good sample of the best or most enlightening ones. Sure, we have to trust them to do that for us, but in exchange for that trust we are more likely to see the good ones. I mean, are *you* reading all 300 in HuffPo? Of course not! And you claim that being able to read the good ones without having to wade through the “crap” is inferior? OK. Different strokes…

And then the death of print media. Greatly exaggerated. Lots of books. Lots of magazines, and news one all the time. Hyperlocal newspaper are doing ok. What we are seeing is actually a problem with news gathering and daily print distribution. The daily newspaper was supposed to be timely, and it no longer can compete on timeliness. Print was a great, because papers has the distribution network with which they could deliver news, ads, sports, weather, commentary, etc.. With a cheaper distribution medium in place, daily newspapers have been hit, yet again. Furthermore, the problem has not been they they don’t have an audience, but rather than the cost for providing their type of content is not supported by the new media. They’ve got readers, they just don’t have (enough) readers who pay (enough).

So, the death of print media? Greatly exaggerated. It’s the death of daily newspapers that has the media in a tizzy, not the death of print media.

And let’s be clear here: That’s not about print vs. hypertext. Print has explicit links, and much online lacks hypertext (e.g. the discussion on this page is virtually devoid of hypertext). Rather, it print vs. electronic.

But literally they’re not the same thing, and hyperbolically it seems only to cloud the issue.

I respect the resistance to dictating the *shoulds*, which is why I always perk up when I read them being tossed around. Your response – that you use it to incite local reflection among stakeholders – is something I have no argument with.

Butter knives and chainsaws? Which do you think is appropriate for the classroom?

(A glib response? Sure. But it allows me to segue to the point I want to make.)

You — and others — seem to think that I am against these technologies. You couldn’t be more wrong. I LOVE these technologies.

However, I am not so sure that all of them belong in the classroom, or should have a large place in the classroom. Let me explain…

In response to WM, I tried to explain where Will and I were coming from. This is a difficult thing to do, to *fairly* summarize your opponents’ view to someone else. Will did not correct me, and he quotes me doing it in his next post, so I think that I was successful. In fact, in trying to frame both of our arguments fairly and in equivalent terms, it looks like I got him thinking in some new ways that he found worth his while.

How did I learn to do that? How might we teach our students to do that? It involves listening to what you opponent says/writes, listening to yourself as your opponent might hear you, looking for assumptions and foundations of each of your positions and finding a common language with which to express both of them.

Now, is that something that is easier to teach with online discussion, or is it easier to teach with in-person and live discussions. “Wait a second, Ellen. Can you explain to Tom what Eric is saying?…Eric, is that right, or close?Now, Ellen, can you similarly briefly explain your point to Eric?…Eric, it’s your turn, can you explain Ellen’s point, and your point to Tom?….Ellen, does that seem like a fair representation of your point?”

Hell, that’s a great lesson for the playground sqaubble, for the History discussion, for English lesson. It’s even got its place in science and math class (e.g. preferred plan of attack on a problem).

You want to teach that lesson online? I’d rather do that in person with a group of kids than online, any day.

And that’s my big point. In order to teach kids to take advantage of this medium, we don’t have to use the medium. The old lessons (see Will’s next post) apply here as well. And if they are easier to teach in-person, let’s not get distracted by all the bells and whistles.

You’ve put quite a lot out there, so I’m going to break up my response into parts.

I start on the straw man point you make, as it most sticks in my craw.

If you want to read me literally, I think you should read will literally as well.

* “I think too often I fall into looking at these tools and wonder what they can add to our classrooms and our teaching when the real question is how can our classrooms and teaching add capacity to the tools”

* “And, more importantly, there are lots of new things that we can teach them using technology”

* “Schools need to change to take advantage of the affordances of whatever technologies develop at the moment”

* “We can’t simply be looking at ways to use new tools to teach the same old stuff. We need to be looking at ways that we can maximize what the tools make possible”

All of those — but most of especially the last one — point towards what you have labeled my straw man. Taken literally — as you take me — it is what Will has written that I am arguing with, not some imaginary straw man — unless Will is far more imaginary than I am.

More importantly though, you — an English teacher yourself — could recognize intentional hyperbole in response to exaggerated claims. My point on this — which Will elevates and builds on in his next post — is one of focus.

People argue about “the chicken and the egg,” but we actually know that the egg came first; many of these chicken and egg arguments actually have answers. While some might think that we need to think about the purpose/lasting lessons at the same time as how we might use technology to teach them, I very much believe that the former must come first. My concern about Will and others is a tendency to get caught up in the latter without giving proper (i.e. 75%+) attention to the former.

I would add here, because it especially germane to this point, that the there is definitive answer to why, there is no definitive list of lasting lessons. These is not technical questions with verifiably correct answers. Rather, they questions that we — educators, parents, community leaders, researchers, academics and the rest — need to continually revisit, even while we accept that different groups can come to different and equally valid answers.

I’ve been asked in this thread for my list, and I would rather decline to give it. It is more important to me to encourage educators to enter the discussion so that they can reexamine their curricula, pedagogy and daily lessons with these questions in mind. I want school communities to come to answers together so that they can provide with students educations worthy of the name. That cannot happen with more imposed goals and teachers closing their doors to ignore them when no one is looking.

This is one of those time when it is about the journey, rather than the destination. So long as educators — and the larger communities — are on this journey, we have a chance of seeing substantive improvement in our schools. We must think about what we are doing, and what lasting lessons we are — or are not — teaching. We must think about why. And with these ideas active in our minds, then we can start to talk about technology.

Or so I hope.

Schools and Churches seem the slowest institutions to adapt to new learnings and realities. Have some sugar with that irony.

I’ve read the entire coelaf thread and annotated with Diigo as I went. I’ll copy and paste that digital marginalia here so as to make it less *cough cough* isolated than it would be on a library or home bookshelf – or on Diigo, which is not the right tech tool for this *cough cough* nuanced, complex discussion of Will’s primary text.

By copying and pasting my atomistic thoughts so, I’ll be able to see if and how they’re played upon by others here, and possibly learn from that. Here they go – and they’re not, by the way, all “pro-Will” and “anti-coelaf” (or pro/anti-technology).

~~

1. I see the “same old stuff” and “those timeless [i.e., "old," presumably] lessons” as far from identical.

The “same old stuff” contains much traditional curriculum that is long overdue a review and overhaul. Much could probably be tossed — in fact, all but a few “timeless lessons.”

2. Everybody seems to be talking about what the relation of old KNOWLEDGE to new TOOLS. I hope this conversation shifts to what NEW KNOWLEDGE students need for the future.

And I hope, if it does, it doesn’t fetishize techonology and 21st century skills TOO much.

I hope somebody modestly proposes the possibility, at least, that there is such a thing as an exaggerated faith in the value of KNOWING EVERYTHING, which tech and the infinite web might exacerbate. Maybe one type of NEW KNOWLEDGE worth considering is how to live more simply and self-sufficiently (okay, that’s a skill, I guess), rather than — or in counterbalance to — the overheated hyperreality that the web can encourage.

–

I expect “what we *should* focus on” and “valuable lessons” to be specified or at least clarified by the end of this thread.

–

coelaf, when you write,

“Do you mean to imply that all print media is linear and isolated? Who taught you to read and do research? Footnotes, endnotes, posterniks (or whatever they’re called) are all breaks from linearity. Haven’t you ever turned back to earlier pages, to read them again in light of what came later?”

–you protest too much. Footnotes are to hyperlinks what butter-knives are to chain-saws.

You can’t talk back to footnotes, either. If you do, hardly anybody else will see them in the libary book you “vandalized” or the private book on your shelf.

It’s hard, too, to refute the relative “isolation” of print compared to digital. Three letters to the editor in the Sunday Paper v. Thee HUNDRED comments on a HuffPo article. (And yes, much of them are crap. And that “them” is intentionally ambiguous.)

Print media is also quickly dying, or at least being inexorably eclipsed by hypertext, so this point is really moot, railing against the very obvious tide of history.

–

coelaf: “‘The discussions, as evidence here, are much more nuanced and complex, as well as potentially richer, more cross cultural, etc.” Much more all these thing *than* what or *for* what?”

My response: ou seem to have misunderstood the key word: “DISCUSSIONS.” Will’s not talking about TEXTS, he’s talking about _discussions of_ them being more “nuanced and complex” when socially carried out online – as in this thread.

I’ll take it back if you show me a letters to the editors section in any newspaper, or a feedback section to any footnotes in a book, that are as open, transparent, elaborate, accessible, and lively as this here post and thread.

And you’re hearing this from an English/history teacher and bibliophile. Shelly Blake-Plock addresses this beautifully in Books Were Nice. You really would enjoy it, coelaf and everybody. Great writer and impressive mind in that Shelly.

–

ceolaf writes: “Just because the tool makes such lessons possible doesn’t make it worth their time. The goal should *not* be to teach everything that the technology makes possible. The goal should be to teach the lasting lessons the best we can though best use of pedagogy, technology and all the rest.”

My response: This is your own straw man. Nobody made the claim, afaik.

–

coelaf continues: “The goal should be to teach the lasting lessons the best we can….”

Me: Define these “lasting lessons”? Please? Anybody?

Or at least estimate: How much of standard curriculum could be tossed as of “no lasting value”? What percentage? 10? 40? 80?

Then ask, “How can technology AND school re-design – not just physical, but also organizational – accelerate the learning of the percentage not tossed into the scrap-heap?

Then ask – back to my first plea – “What NEW knowledge and skills can be learned with the surplus learning time newly freed up by the combination of technology and curricular Spring Cleaning?” (Centennial Cleaning, really, is what’s needed.)

Call me crazy, but I think there are a few skills and knowledge-bases unique to the 21st century, and that need considerably more attention in schools.

Climate change is one. How to study it, how to evaluate other studies of it, how to adapt to it in daily life, how to innovate against it, how to collaborate to avoid the inevitable conflicts it will cause (and is already causing).

It’s here, and it’s not going to get better any century soon. In light of that fact (to all but the ostriches), how important is the epistolary tradition to kids with that in their future?

–

Parting shots:

1. What old learning should die, and more importantly, what new learning – beyond technological savvy and social media buzzwords – should replace it?

I’ll throw one out there, in light of the climate change point above, and it’s real geeky:

gardening/farming/basic food cultivation.

2. Does anybody who actually uses technology in education (thoughtfully), as opposed to the corporate and think-tanky groups that launched the Partnership for 21st C. Skills, really think P21 gets it right? I don’t, and I doubt many others do.

My problem is nearly the opposite: I’ve struggled with teachers to allow more technology-enhanced products (not necessarity PPT)and not limit their students to pen/paper. It comes down to a matter of what the teacher is comfortable grading – so maybe we should all be looking at the assessment piece(s).