Doctoral Conversation

Questing Disposition

2011-06-02T06:52:00.004-06:00

I have completed my field work and believe I have completed my first cycle of coding with one of the two schools that I have collected field data from. I have spoken several times with the notes, images, and audio that I recorded during my classroom visits. I have also returned to both of my classrooms in order to catch up with the projects I saw unfolding during my first visits and to interview each teacher one last time to check the clarity of my interpretations. These interviews have been recorded and have in some sense become as Ezzy (2002) describes as a place, “where meanings, interpretations and narrative are co-constructed” (p. 100).

My original motivation for doing this research is that Alberta teachers are being asked to become “Architects of Innovative Learning Environments” (Government of Alberta, 2010) and to teach in ways that they were not taught. This means that as teachers they must become learners. For some this is a move to another planet and others just a walk across the street. Regardless it is not what many teachers signed up for.

Innovation by its simplest definition is the introduction of something new. I however believe it is much more than introducing a new device in school. Innovation as how the newness is captured adopted and shared. Denning & Dunham, (2010) describe innovation as the taking and using of newness (invention) together for a common goal (community). We should never separate ourselves from the tools we create. The most amazing inventions are nothing without people to use them. Innovation is a place of possibility. For adoption to take place the user must adopt a playful curious attitude towards the device. Thomas & Seely Brown, (2011) refer to this a questing disposition. I set out to see if I could understand how teachers might make sense of this experience with innovation and I have set out to describe this lived experience using narrative in a case study.

In my candidacy paper I wrote metaphorically about ‘Education-land’ as if it were an island. Tradition has placed teachers on one side of the island and innovation is on the other side of it. How do we get them there? Who should build the pathways? In my research I have constructed three main themes to analyze my data. The first theme is the demand for teachers to teach in ways that they were not taught. The second theme is what I call confounding variables or the red lights that slow the travel across the island. The third theme is the notion of pathways to travel across the island.

In each of these themes there are sub-themes and each with a code. I created a spreadsheet in an attempt to untangle the confusion of all of these codes. I counted the frequency of each theme and subtheme and used these numbers to create a graph. At first nothing seemed to reveal itself. I can see that the two most common demands that are being met for students are Personalized Learning [1.1] and Collaborative Shared Leadership [1.7]. The two most commonly observed confounding variables are the Tyranny of Time [2.2] and the Traditional Concept of School (Old School way of working) [2.5]. The two major pathways that I have observed are the use of Available Innovative Technology [3.8] and Flexibility [3.3]. This flexibility is either the teacher responding to unplanned events, planning for the diversity of her student’s needs or the administration’s intentional use of flexible scheduling. Yet what does this mean? Unsatisfied I returned to the literature on Qualitative data analysis.

While reading, The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers and Qualitative Analysis: Practice and Innovation a thought occurred to me. I am struggling with my inexperience and with my childish desire to get it right. Time invested in the pursuit of rightness is like throwing seeds into the wind. They might grow somewhere but I am unlikely to benefit from the action. I forgot about my ‘questing disposition’ that my doctoral experience has cultivated. In this quest I have many choices, many paths to walk and many ways to be right. The question of being right or of ‘truth’ becomes a question of truths. I was born on the traditional side of the island yet my questing feet have taken me towards innovation. In my search for an effective way to code my data I do not wish to outright reject traditional object truth but I do need to find a way to put it respectfully off to the side. My questing disposition desires to find ways of describing complexity, not go looking for an answer to reveal itself in a graph. I remind myself this is an interpretive process. It is an ongoing cycle of confusion and sense making. I need a coding method that will help me untangle the confusion and help me honour the voice of teachers in order to tell a story. What is before me in my graph is simply picture of complexity and only part of the description.
The literature reminds me that understanding complexity it is slippery. Because I want to honour the teachers voice and capture the whole of my experience in the field, I need to engage in a conversation with my data like a good friend, a good friend that I know well. I believe I now need to look for connections, and relationships between my experience, my themes and the stories I have heard in the field. So back I go again to talk with my data.
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Denning, P. J., & Dunham, R. (2010). The innovator’s way: Essential practices for successful innovation. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT Press.
Ezzy, D. (2002). Qualitative analysis: Practice and innovation. Social Research Today. London: Routledge.
Government of Alberta. (2010). Inspiring Education: A dialogue with Albertans. Edmonton, Alberta. Retrieved from http://education.alberta.ca/department/ipr/inspiringeducation.aspx
Thomas, D., & Seely Brown, J. (2011). A new culture of learning: Cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. United States: Createspace.

Innovation, creativity and traditional school?

2011-02-28T12:38:00.004-07:00

I am about to conduct fieldwork to explore teacher experience with innovation in the classroom. Many, including myself are wanting teachers to shift their practice away from an authority of knowledge to what the Alberta government calls in Inspiring Education an, “Architect of Knowledge”. We want students to use technology as a tool to support innovation and discovery. Good heavens have we stopped for a moment to really look at what we are asking here? Do teachers know themselves how to use technology as a tool to support their own innovation and discovery?

I sat today and played a little with a thesaurus and the three words, innovation, creativity and tradition. This is what I came up with:

Creativity is:

• artistry

• cleverness

• genius

• imagination

• ingenuity

• inspiration

• inventiveness

• originality

• resourcefulness

• talent

• vision

Innovation is:

• addition

• alteration

• cutting edge

• departure

• deviation

• introduction

• latest thing

• leading edge

• modification

• shift

• state of the art

• vanguard

The thesaurus came up with what seemed to me a pretty positive list for creativity and innovation while a rather mixed list for tradition. Regardless of the list it appears, at the moment this 'shift' we want teachers to maneuver is an easy one step for some, and a great leap into the darkness for others. I look around and wonder what gives? I never lost my kindergarten curiosity, so I played around further with the collection of words from the tradition list a little and this is what I came up with:

We are asking teachers regardless of their age and experience to leave behind stable firm ground, a secure place of wisdom, heritage and a culture of established practice. Tradition is an accepted, familiar comfortable place founded on a confirmed, tried and true verified method to get the ‘job of school’ done. It has been endorsed by the popular, everyday way of thinking about school by society in general. It is a system instituted and entrenched by time-honoured tradition. While at the same time acknowledge as a universal over the entire planet. Tradition is old, it is old school, old hat and without thinking it produces same old, same old teaching. I think the problem for some that travel in the teaching landscape is that they may have been pulled into a rut, fixed there firm on custom. Perhaps becoming too familiar leads some teach more out of habit, playing it safe with the conventional and happy with the ordinary. Based on the collection of words I came up with. Tradition can be both a wonderful and constrained place if the rules become fixed and the stories of experienced are hushed. I think at the heart of this is perhaps the question of what school is for has shifted as we leave the industrial age. School in the industrial age was meant to be efficient. Teachers were just ‘cogs in the wheel’. School became a place of ‘teacher musts’ sent from a place that did think deeply about what school was for. Traditionally teachers were never really invited to participate intellectually in curriculum as John Dewey suggested about 100 years ago. I am more interested in the question of how do we shift a the system that once discouraged participation to now encourage teachers to engage in mindful, thoughtful interaction with why we have school? The rug that teachers stand on has just been pulled. The question should not be what is wrong with teachers? We need to ask how do we support teachers to find their own feet? As a teacher do I really own my own learning? How do we give teachers a voice to their own questions in their own learning and to treat them like participatory citizens that Dewey suggested?

The questions that continue to concern me as a teacher/researcher are:

1. What opportunities do teachers have to make sense of their experiences with innovation and change?

2. We do not make it easy for students to be innovative by making it difficult for teachers to be innovative. Can we describe clearly what is standing in the way of teachers becoming both creative and innovative?

3. Technology changes quickly, teachers regularly come into contact with technology they have no experience with. How do we help them gain this experience and reduce their frustration?

4. To become an architect of learning requires teachers to teach differently than they were taught (we can not give what we do not have). How can we support teachers to build their own profession learning networks during working hours?

5. Given that People not technology will be the solutions to problems, how do we adjust the structure of the working environment to allow for the free flowing exchange of ideas to support their personalized learning?

'Crisping' up the research pitch

2011-02-06T20:26:00.002-07:00

Architects of Innovative Learning Environments: A Descriptive Case Study

Doctoral Research Question:

How do teachers make sense of their experiences with new and emerging technologies (innovation and change) such as the iPad?

1. Background

(Perhaps because I am a teacher I believe your experience is important)

· I wish to clarify the complexity of your teaching experience as you engage with innovation and change.

· I also wish to promote understanding and empathy of your experience and your perceptions, within the iPad project

(Because a teacher’s experience is both unique and common, your story has the potential to “teach”)

· Your story will be the foundation for my doctoral dissertation

· Your story may inform future strategies to support fellow teachers

· The lessons learned may inform future school reform and professional development opportunities for teachers

2. What you will be asked to do

(Because understanding is social, takes place over time and best done within it natural setting)

· Participate in ongoing dialogue within your school day 6-8 weeks

· Share your choice of apps and how the iPad is used in teacher administration such as lesson plans, day plans, calendars

· Allow me to take photos to describe the classroom and iPad use (no students) I will ask for your permission before any photos of you are used in future presentations

3. My Role

Because I believe I will not learn your story by becoming a burden or making you uncomfortable

· I am only interested in your experience with the iPad, however I am willing to participate in any classroom activities (an extra set of supportive hands in a busy classroom)

· My presence will provide an opportunity for dialogue and perhaps personal reflection

· I will be keeping field texts to describe setting, make observations, capture conversations and reflect on my own experience

· I will try to capture and honour your voice and provide opportunities for you to clarify your story

4. My Beliefs

· We are connected through story, we make sense of experience by telling stories

· We do not make it easy for students to be innovative by making it difficult for teachers to be innovative

· Technology changes quickly, teachers will regularly come into contact with technology they have no experience with

· Innovation (Architects of learning) requires teachers to teach differently than they were taught

· People not technology will be the solutions to problems

The Capacity of Story

2011-01-19T15:25:00.004-07:00

John Dewey has left behind a story that I believe I might be able to re-introduce. In his story he told us that a participatory citizen requires a competence to tell and understand stories; also that we do not make it easy for students to learn, by making it difficult for teachers to learn. Participatory citizens in culture means it is possible for us to learn from the stories we tell each other. In culture there is no solo voice. “All human experience is social: it involves contact and communication” (Dewey, 1938, p. 38). Dewey would teach us that experience is a moving force, like a vine growing on top of itself.

Good teachers try to organize the conditions of experience for their students, they then allow their students to personalize their experience by re-tell their story in their own words. I would add that stories that teach, are re-created and co-constructed with each telling, in this way good teachers let the ‘experience’ be the teacher. Good teachers do not expect the future telling of a story with educative power to be the same as it was in the past telling. Teachers thus become the architects, designers or gardeners of learning rather than transmitters of a static finished product. Some call it lived experience.

Experience that educates (the story told in lived experience) is valued and judged by not only those remembering the event as the storyteller but also those who imagine themselves in the story as listeners. Stories that educate need to live. Dewey taught us that experience potentially is a teacher, but there will be no learning without the story of experience. How we access educative stories is dependent on our connection to each other, and our ability to listen is effected by our attentiveness to this connection. With our tools of technology we have built a structure around the earth. We live within it. As Marshal McLuhan (1968) expresses, the environment has become a technological thing. Nature is not separate or at war with technology, both are included in this environment. Our tools not only extend our humanity but also have become a place we live and connect. Good or bad we are now connected in a more powerful way. “We're just increasing our humanness and our ability to connect to each other regardless of geography" Case 2010. This technological environment is just helping us behave more ‘human-like’ in our storytelling ways. As humans, whether in an artist, scientist, or storyteller mode, it is unwise to disconnect from the tools we make, the value choices we make in their use and the experience we have with them.

We are a creative, curious, storytelling people. Should we think of stories as disconnected tools in teaching and learning or is it better to think of them as partners in learning? Can we really put down our creations once we have made them or do they come with us as we move in experiential learning? With this 'capacity' of story, what might happen if we make teachers storytellers? Could their story then become a teacher? What might happen if we bring together two voices that do not normally have common dialogue with each other, such as teachers and school reformers? What might I learn if I place myself between them?

This thinking was imagined while reading, “Letting Stories Breathe” by Arthur W. Frank and revisiting the following:

Case, A. (2011). We are all cyborgs now | Video on TED.com. TED Talk, . Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/amber_case_we_are_all_cyborgs_now.html

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York, NY, USA: Kappa Delta Pi.

McLuhan, M., and Mailer, N. (1968). Debate on CBC Television, . Retrieved from http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5470443898801103219#

Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes | Video on TED.com

2011-01-19T10:21:00.002-07:00

The kind of experiential learning that this talk beautifully describes requires teachers to teach in a way that they have not experienced themselves either as students or in becoming a teachers.
So... I ask how do we (School) then make is easier for teachers to think of themselves as learners? How do we make is safe for them to fail?

Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes | Video on TED.com

Architects of Innovative Learning Environments: A Descriptive Case Study

2010-12-11T16:22:00.001-07:00

The Case: How do teachers make sense of their experiences with new and emerging technologies such as the iPad to enhance their teaching practice?

· It is hoped that this study will clarify the complexity of teacher experience as they engage with innovation and change.

· It wishes to gain insight to inform future strategies to support teachers

· It may potentially inform future school reform and professional development opportunities for teachers

· It is an inquiry to promote understanding of teacher experience, and thus take the form of a descriptive case study.

· My interest is intrinsic.

· The emphasis will be on my interpretation within an already familiar landscape (elementary school use of technology).

1. My Role

· Participant observer with a position of privilege and familiarity

· I am interested in understanding the ongoing experiences and perceptions of teachers in the iPad project

· Spend time (2 months) in the classroom environment during planning and instruction time in order to establish a narrative relationship and make observations within a natural teaching environment

· My experience is one voice among many

2. The Setting and Actors (Bounded and Natural)

· In one elementary school already selected to meet the criteria of the iPad project

· One or two willing teachers already involved in the iPad project.

· No recruiting - part of an existing study

· Include conversations with other staff that support the teacher (principal, IT)

· Both unique and common (family resemblance)

· Three dimensional inquiry space

3. Artifacts of Interest

· Look at choice of apps

· Look at how the iPad is used in teacher administration such as lesson plans, day plans

· Take note of classroom organization, how is the iPad used in instruction and the documentation process of inquiry

· Look for opportunities to personalize the iPads use

· Keep dual field texts supported with digital pen recordings of observations and conversations (natural language description)

· Include Teacher thoughts and insights from project journals

· Include photos to describe setting and iPad use

4. Method

· Case Study with emergent design

· Naturalistic and Interpretive

· Continuous dialogue, listen and interpret teacher stories of experience

· Enter the scene with familiarity

· An inquiry to promote understanding of ‘case’

· Study the particular and capture complexity in it’s natural setting

5. Assumptions

· Knowledge is gained through social construction (experience happens narratively)

· Learning is contextual and fluid

· Tacit knowledge while difficult to articulate is critical for understanding

· Qualitative research turns the world into a series of representations in order describe and open an understanding

· Interpretation is concerned with re-generation of meaning that comes from new understanding within the already familiar (prior knowledge)

· Technology changes quickly, new and experienced teachers will regularly come into contact with technology that they have no experience with.

· Becoming architects of learning requires teachers to teach differently than they were taught

· We are connected through story, we make sense of experience by telling stories (narrative mode of thinking and knowing)

· People not technology will be the solutions to problems

Personal Beliefs and Assumptions about Educational Technology

2010-12-03T10:22:00.003-07:00

1. The Technology itself (A Tool to get work done)

a. Technology changes quickly

- New and experienced teachers will regularly come into contact with technology that they have no experience with.

- It is helpful if teachers are open to potential experts within their classrooms. (Students may come with unique skills)

- We should not assume young teachers have more skills with technology.

- We need to develop strategies for teacher learning and sharing of ideas of innovative uses, as they become available e.g. professional learning networks, twitter.

b. Technology has a ubiquitous presence

- At what point do we stop talking about past technology (the over head projector). When do we either take it for granted or cast it aside? Is this cause for needless expense?

c. Technology can hold information for us to collect when wanted

d. Emphasis needs to be placed on good tasks, not the technology that serves them (Papert, constructionism)

- Technologies may extent and expand human capacity.

- Technology may shorten the path to efficiency but placing too much emphasis on efficiency will lead to pressure for teachers to master the tool and not the job that needs doing. (Feenberg) http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/feenberg/komaba.htm

Not just a tool to get work done, but also the place where we meet to do it. We can be connected in and with technology (Actor Network Theory). http://www.learning-theories.com/actor-network-theory-ant.html

2. Technology may Connect us (Not just a tool but a ‘place’)

a. A means through which we might relate and participate with the world (Digital Citizen)

b. Digital technology enables us to have a ‘presence’ even at a distance

- Personally I believe the best learning happens in a face to face, hands on, I need to know learning situation, but I recognize that good learning can still happen at a distance made possible by digital technology.

c. We can tell our stories and have feedback from others without physically being there (YouTube)

d. With collaborative technology students can meet to co-create, explore and work on a common task (Google Groups)

- In this ‘place’ teachers can begin to be concerned with creating learning environments that connects student’s questions to a world full of meaning.

We cannot understand technology merely looking at how it functions or by separating it from the experience of using it.

3. The Experience of using Technology in teaching and learning

a. Learning is contextual (constructivism)

- Technology should be introduced and explored in context

- Vygotsky, Piaget, Dewey, Rorty, Bruner

b. There are unintended consequences (Not a neutral tool)

- Both good and bad and everything in between. We need to be aware and responsive when needed, but being afraid is not helpful for innovation.

c. A professional literacy and skill is required for teachers

- General home experience with technology is not sufficient for the classroom.

- Developing a professional literacy is a personal, complex process. One size does not fit all.

- Teachers are busy people they need professional time to expand all of their teaching skills, including technology.

- Placing expertise (Help Desk off site) too far away is frustrating for teachers and leads to reluctance of use.

d. Learning is social

- We do not live in a vacuum we make sense of what we learn by telling stories about it.

e. Tacit knowledge is critical and difficult to express in text (Experiential Learning)

- We convert the lessons learned in experience into practical knowledge for future use (Dewey)

f. Lived Knowledge is a temporal affair (Dewey)

- The tools of technology will come and go. We should not get stuck or distracted by them.

g. Integration critical, not an add on subject

- We are talking about the need to integrate technology by connecting it in multiple ways to a curriculum and personal inquiry at an appropriate grade level, skill level and subject. (Connectivism) http://www.connectivism.ca/?p=116

- Need drives learning, the choice of ‘tools’ we use to support learning need to be readily accessible to support what we want to know when we want to know it.

h. Good teaching and learning needs to be the focus

- Technology should be in the background. We should not neglect the nature of knowledge in educational technology.

- We should shift the emphasis from what are the barriers for teachers to integrate technology to what are the barriers for teachers developing philosophical thinking about the nature of knowledge in educational technology.

Much of education reform seems to be connected to the idea of ‘teacher proofing’. It is the idea that a teacher can be given laptops but not given administration of them. It sends the message that teachers are not competent professionals and the experts are better able to make decisions about technology. If we want teachers to use technology for exploration we need to open a place for them to explore and permission to think of themselves as explorers. We do not make it easy for students by making it difficult for teachers!

4. School Reform and Change Assumptions

a. Change needs to come from a teacher enabling, reflective participation (Willis, Schön)

- Teachers are the key agents for change in the knowledge society (Hargreaves)

- Change needs to be more than correctly implementing a plan developed by someone else (personalization, differentiation)

b. Site based

- Solutions are not universal

c. Collaborative and Emergent vision

- Don’t begin with the end in mind

d. Theory should not be separate from practice

- Teacher’s questions tend to be of a practical nature.

e. Technology should not be thought of as a catalyst for change

- We cannot assume technology has an autonomous power to change teacher’s philosophy of knowledge.

The work on this blog post reflects my many experiences as a technology lead teacher, student and my doctoral candidacy exam. My memories were awakened after reading the following:

Willis, J. (2001). Foundational assumptions for information technology and teacher education. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, [Online serial] , 1 (3) . Available: http://www.citejournal.org/vol1/iss3/editorials/article1.htm

Philosophy of Technology: Tool?

2010-09-09T17:21:00.003-06:00

I have just received my candidacy questions. The following is my first attempt to write about what my philosophy of technology is in response to one of them. Have you taken the time to write about yours yet? I hope this might get you thinking:
My task today is to construct my own story of understanding and share it with you in the hopes that it might echo with your own story of experience. To do this as Ihde (2004) explains, we need to not just ‘study’ philosophy but to also ‘do’ philosophy. It is more than compiling facts into bits and pieces. We need to think deeply and organize these bits critically for ourselves, then we need to talk to each other so we can reorganize the new bits.
So as I begin to unpack the philosophy of technology as it is packaged for me, at first I see a paradox or a double edge sword. It is common to hear people speak of hope and possibilities with technology while others speak of danger and warnings. The good or bad uses of technology. As John Dewey points out, “Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites” (1938, p. 17). Yet initially most of us see technology as a neutral tool to extend human capacity. Simplistically we believe that it is a means to end human suffering. If the technology isn’t working it is because we need to get better at using it. We should not question the technocrats because they know more than us.
I wonder If I am going to discuss technology from the standpoint of a tool I need to go deeper into my philosophy of technology, my philosophy of teaching and learning, as well as my philosophy of educational technology.
Before I began my doctoral studies I never thought much about philosophy, let alone my philosophy of technology. Even with a masters degree in Educational Technology I largely took for granted my philosophy of all things technological. My thinking at the time was that philosophy was a subject, something people paid money to study at university. My philosophy of technology was something either invisible or just out of focus for me. I never felt capable or even invited to do so nor did I have a place to do it.
To begin, is technology in the classroom a tool? Is it an applied science? Is it a system of correlated means and ends? For that matter can we call it a place? At first glance the term tool implies a neutrality. Meaning that technology is simply a human invention that may be used in good or bad ways. But who must take responsibility in how it is used, maintained, and repaired when broken? Are the tools of technology really separate from us and what we value? Using and choosing technology for a purpose is a specific value choice in itself is it not. I do not believe we can understand technology by looking at how it functions.
If it is an applied science then it is a human activity. This might also indicate a neutrality. Is technology something we go out and do?
If it is a system then we can think of it as a pattern. Patterns do not exist in isolation. Hardware can hardly function without it’s human, and humans must learn how to operate the hardware. Are people and their technology not connected in a system somehow? Do we learn from technology, learn with technology or learn in technology? What is it we mean when we say as teachers we want to create a learning environment?
Perhaps it is a little of all of these things, the use of technology given the choice of how to use it becomes more than just a means ‘to’ an end. Rather it becomes a means through which we might relate and participate with the world. I write this blog you might respond. In this case technology may be thought of as a place. Feenberg (1999) and Franklin (1999) have used the metaphor of a house, “The house is not a devise but an extremely rich and meaningful life environment” (p. xi). In our houses we have many tools that we use to help us enjoy life and connect to each other. The tools of technology have built a structure around us. He continues, “That the real world of technology is a network, not a system, but a network that encompasses a system within it” (2008, p. 22).
I believe philosophy is a personal way of thinking about and acting in the world that we wonder about. For that matter it is something we are all capable of doing to some extent. I think that it is important the I participant with my philosophy as I come to understand it, as nothing really seems to become visible until we take the time to intentionally interact with it. I am drawn to this wonder in the hope of creating wisdom. So for this purpose I wish to use the expression “go native”(Ihde, 2004, p. 91) with my philosophy of technology to become an informed participant in a more global (wide angle) discussion of it.
I believe all teachers have a philosophy of technology but not many have taken the time or been given the space to think deeply about how and why they use technology in their classrooms and personal life. Often they are told they just have to. It shows up in how they allow their students to interact with technology and the language they use.
More will follow in the coming days...

References:
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York, NY, USA: Kappa Delta Pi.

Dusek, V. (2006). Philosophy of technology: An introduction. London: Blackwell. Retrieved from http://books.google.ca/books?id=Iy7o0tPVMJgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=val+dusek&source=bl&ots=72KdashwIt&sig=vod7OVgSE78zE5pSEkaw_D3uFb4&hl=en&ei=T-yHTPqtI5OesQPRyoygCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CC4Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

Feist, R., Beauvais, C., & Shukla, R. (2010). Technology and the changing face of humanity. Ottawa, Ontario: University of Ottawa Press.

Franklin, U. M. (1999). The real world of technology. CBC Massey Lectures (2004th ed.). Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc.

Ihde, D. (2004). Philosophy of technology. In P. Kemp (Ed.), World and Worldhood (pp. 91-108). Printed in the Netherlands: Springer.

Response to Inspiring Education

2010-06-07T20:14:00.004-06:00

What is ahead for tomorrow’s learner in Alberta?
A response to “Inspiring Education: A Dialogue with Albertans”

While reading through this 52-page document I am indeed inspired. It speaks to my foundational question, “How do we live well together in a knowledge based economy?” I question, as it does the role and responsibility of schools in this society. Do we have a clear request of teachers in this place? It is aligned with my core belief that we learn through experience and that knowledge is a key resource for all participants in the global community.
The problem for my study also fits comfortably into what the report describes as the vision of “three E’s”. The vision’s first “E” is that our school system should instill in our young people the ability to think critically about how to use technology to learn, innovate, communicate and discover. The second is our system needs to encourage young people to be ethical citizens that contribute to the community and the world. The third is that the system needs to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit and create opportunities for young people to be innovative. I see a tension for teachers here. Is there not a gap between what teachers have experienced and what they are being asked to provide for their students in this vision?

The report veers from my views in its outline in how to make this vision possible. While the report recognizes the need to involve the community in the learning environment, it states that children must be at the centre of all decisions related to learning. Yes but I think we need to begin by recognizing the teacher as the key agent for change and that teachers themselves are key learners in this community. I believe that we will not get students to learn well by making id difficult for teachers to learn. The report suggests that the role of teachers needs to shift from that of knowledge authority to an architect of learning. It states that teachers need to be innovative and it questions, as I do how we prepare teachers for this new experience. My concern with all of these “teacher should" statements in this report is that teachers will once again find themselves blamed for not keeping up with the kids. If we want these things from teachers we will need to be rather intentional about how to give it to them first. The report comes close when it states, “to truly transform education, the system must empower innovation throughout the province” (p.18). How do we do this without first empowering teachers to transform their own learning? It supports my thinking when it states that these qualities can be nurtured by a less restrictive curriculum and meaningful professional development and building structures that allow for regular exchange of ideas (p.27). The purpose of my study will be to explore in narrative with expert teachers as they live the experience of becoming what the Calgary Board of Education refers to as “digital citizens”. This experience would give teachers a chance to be reflective practitioners; place teachers in the drivers seat and give them a chance to participate in their own learning of the vision mentioned in this report. I wish to invite teachers into a conversation to explore these possibilities.

Inspiring Education

2010-06-02T19:02:00.003-06:00

Inspiring Education has released the Steering Committees Report. What should we think of the report and its vision?
Download PDF:
http://www.inspiringeducation.alberta.ca/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=wqYRVMaWPH8%3D&tabid=124

The Very Brief Proposal

2010-05-30T15:08:00.005-06:00

Empowering the Potential of Digital Citizenship in Teachers through Narrative

My Foundational Question:
How do we live well together in a knowledge society?
Some would say we should to do this by participating as digital citizens. What is the role and responsibility of schools in this society? If education is a social function to make for a brighter future, do we as a democratic society have a clear request of teachers?

Problem: Building a theory
As governments and school boards move to embrace the demands of the knowledge society, teachers are being called upon to radically change their practice and to embrace a rather abstract notion of digital citizenship. I see a tension for teachers. A gap between what they are expected to provide and what they actually are able to impart. They find themselves on the front line of preparing students to be digitally connected in society as critical thinkers and ethical participants, yet they themselves do not appear to have much experience as digital citizens and have little opportunity to talk to each other about it. I believe that we will not get students to learn well by making it difficult for teachers to learn. How can we best support teachers take ownership of the learning required to make this change? I also believe it is possible that teachers could be the key agents for change if given the chance to be reflective practitioners? I wish to invite teachers into such a conversation.

Purpose:
The purpose of my proposed study is to explore in narrative with veteran teachers as they live the experience of becoming digital citizens after years of experience in the classroom. Following Dewey my goal is to look for connected experience, not to go chasing after certainty but to tell a reflexive story that others can imagine themselves in. Dialogue seems to me to be the right place to start but not the right place to stop. The hope of the study is to describe for others the possible tensions and triumphs that teachers face as they attempt to create learning environments that allow students to connect and participate ethically in a digital age.

Emerging Questions:
How does your schools digital citizenship strategy impact you and your teaching?
What is digital citizenship?
What do you feel you are a citizen of? Why does this matter?
How are you introducing it in your classroom? How do you want it to look like?
What supports will you use to expand your knowledge?
How are you able to share your understanding of it with other teachers?
How do you connect or interact in it?
How has your understanding of global citizenship changed in the last few years?
How have you come to understand this?
How important is it for your teaching for your students?
What skills do you think your students need in the future? How will you support them?
What do you think Canada’s role is in a knowledge society?

Please add to my list of questions!

Let Out the Creative Beast

2010-05-20T20:02:00.001-06:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Let Out the Creative Beast

View more presentations from Betsy Streeter.

Storytelling in a digital landscape

2010-05-13T20:45:00.002-06:00

We are a storytelling people and we live in a story telling landscape. That is if we choose to participate. I first noticed this when I was a young mother and I would tell my childbirth experience to other mothers, they always came back with an interesting story of their own. Over the years I have heard many stories each of them weaved and connected with shared experience. We live our life stories like bubbles blowing in the wind, floating between all alone yet never far always seeking each other. In the nod of a head we may gently cradle fragments of each other’s story in relationship for brief moments and connect what is similar our lived stories. “There is a reflexive relationship between living a life story, telling a life story, retelling a life story, and reliving a life story”(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 71). Following Dewey my goal is to look for connected experience, not to go chasing after certainty but to tell a reflexive story that others can learn from. With my inquiry I want to be active or rather participate with my own curiosity. What makes me curious is my confusion. Teachers are being asked to become digitally confident and to create learning environments were students could develop fully as digital citizens. What confuses me is how teachers are expected to gain confidence when many teachers report that their students know more than they do about the digital landscape. When teachers have no personal experience with technology they also worry about the time to learn something new. They also complain that it takes so long to get IT help when the network goes down and they are not able to personalize computers by adding new applications when they feel they need them. There are many barriers for teachers using technology in the digital landscape but none more frustrating than attempting to give something you do not have. I hope that my research may reveal possible paths to smooth the crumpled tension I believe many teachers experience daily as they endeavor to teach digital citizenship to students.

The place I wish to situate my research is in a reflexive landscape because I believe in the power of lived knowledge best described in experience. Yet I fear that standing in the middle of this ever-changing vista may cause me to loose my balance. As a reflexive narrative researcher I expect an unending negotiation to maintain my flexibility and openness. I think it best to settle in, to work alongside teachers and make myself useful. I risk perhaps putting myself out on the edge like an uninvited guest, while I explore the gap between the teachers narrative experience and my own. I understand that the negotiation of the most precious research relationship is ongoing and unending throughout the whole inquiry but in the end is only a snap shot, a brief moment in time. “Good narrative working relationships carry with them a sad and wistful sense born of the possibility of temporariness”(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 72).

Clandinin, D. G., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

How do you become a participatory citizen in a digital society?

2010-05-08T10:19:00.003-06:00

(Updated from last week)

The tools of technology have built a system, “a house” around us (Franklin, 1999, p.1). I believe it has become a place with potential, a “fixer upper” provided we keep the renos up. Just as I live in my house on my street it is a place we may or may not want to participate in, regardless it is there all around us. A participant is not only a citizen that inhabits a place but also one that socially engages in activities that benefit all people that belong. Before this house was built you had to physically be there in order to learn and interact with others. With this technological network there are many other ways to “be there” and learn from each other. Almost one hundred years ago Dewey (1916) wrote about his philosophy of the importance of democracy and education. He believed that schools and its teachers were responsible for building a productive and responsible democratic society. He spoke about communication as a way in which we discover what we have in common in order to form a community. “Any social arrangement that remains vitally shared is educative to those who participate in it” and that the very process of “living together educates”(p.6&7). With that in mind I wonder in the year 2010, in a digital community, how do we live well together? Is it really all that different than what Dewey described oh so long ago? How is it different for teaching and learning? How do we teach students how to participate well, if we ourselves have no experience in this newly renovated house? Who will tell them to pick up their socks? What concerns should we have as parents and teachers if our children live and grow up in a house without us? I am reminded of an old Star Trek episode “Miri”(McEveety, 1966) in which children known as “onlies” (a contraction of only ones left) grew up without grups (“grown ups”). Their life without parental influence had devastating consequences. Dewey speaks of a self-renewal process that he believes occurs in education largely in transmission through communication. What effect would muted voices have on this self-renewal? Dewey would say that life goes on in continuous sequence and the continuity of life means a constant re-adaptation of the environment. Those that do not readapt die out. I am not saying we are in danger of dying out but rather we are in danger of disconnecting with our students and missing the opportunity to participate in an important part of their social lives. I believe we, as teachers need to be there with our students participating as digital citizen for without us how does our wisdom pass on?

This is all well and good yet I do not believe that even if teachers want to learn to become digital citizens that it is easy for them. Teachers are not comfortable not knowing. There is a stirring as if something has disturbed the water. It is in this potentially empowering yet scary place of tension that I want to explore in narrative with teachers as they live the experience of becoming digital citizens.

Dewey, J. (2005). Democracy and education. Stilwell, KS: Digireads.com Publishing.

Franklin, U. M. (1999). The real world of technology. CBC Massey Lectures (2004th ed.). Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc.Google Books

McEveety, V. (1966, October 27). Star Trek: The Original Series. Miri. Retrieved from http://fliiby.com/file/289602/4jzdqi8ha2.html

Until we do it for ourselves...

2010-05-08T09:11:00.001-06:00

What is Digital Citizenship?

2010-05-06T20:05:00.004-06:00

Empowering the Potential of Digital Citizenship for Teachers in Narrative

As I sit with my colleagues in our staffroom and listen as the new digital citizenship strategy is revealed, I see a wave of fear and confusion slowly spreading across the faces of the teachers in the room. What is it we have to do now? What is this digital citizenship stuff people ask? Why can’t kids just get up off the couch and talk to each other? They’re going to bring computers from home? Who’s going to fix it when it doesn’t work? I don’t know how. Being an educational technologist I am quite familiar with all of the terms but the others are not. They are uncomfortable and confused as to what is being asked of them.

On it’s website the Calgary Board of Education (CBE) states that it is committed to helping its students thrive in the 21st century and that digital technologies are a key component for students to reach their full potential within the CBE and beyond. That digital citizenship should be practiced in every course, throughout the school and at home.

Given the reaction from my staff I wonder how teachers have come to experience what the CBE is calling digital citizenship in their professional lives? As teachers what opportunities do we have to personalize our learning? Are we able to choose who and how we collaborate with other teachers? Much research and effort has gone into examining the barriers for teachers in using technology in their classroom but have we really taken the time to explore the tension that is creative for teachers when we ask them to give something they have little experience doing? My experience as a classroom teacher and a doctoral student has opened an awareness of the need to describe the lived experience of teachers as they endeavor to create these safe, personalized and collaborative learning environments for their students within a digital landscape.

The CBE and the university of Calgary are currently involved in a research project around digital citizenship and mobile learning that are similar to my interests. So while the CBE’s research focus questions are:
1. How can the use of mobile devices inform the CBE's digital citizenship strategy?
2. How might mobile learning support the personalization of learning?
3. What impact on student achievement will these devices have?

I wish to explore possible tensions between what teachers are being asked to provide for students and what they have experienced for themselves regarding the democratic use of technology in their classrooms. My research questions would highlight the teacher’s experience and voice:
1. How does the digital citizenship strategy impact you and your teaching?
2. As a teacher what you feel you are a citizen of?
3. What ways do you use technology to collaborate with other teachers?
4. How are you able to participate and personalize your learning what digital citizenship means?

I will bring many voices with me on this journey but the theoretical landscape in which this work lives has grown out of the work of John Dewey in experiential learning and democracy in education. To fully uncover the stories teachers have to tell of their experience I believe will best be told through narrative inquiry.

Research Out on the Edges

2010-04-26T21:05:00.002-06:00

The Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) have defined Educational Technology as such, “The study and ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using and managing appropriate technological processes and resources” (Januszewski, A., Molenda, M., 2008 p.1)

Initially I struggled with the language in this brief definition. I found it linear and hinted towards a dedication to the value of efficiency and perhaps a data driven scientific tradition. As a researcher in the field of educational technology my goal is to come to a collective point of view that includes and values my experience as a classroom teacher. This experience is not linear and has led me to believe that efficiency and the separated notion of cause and effect will not be of much assistance in my understanding of my story of who I am as a teacher/technologist. I do not separate thinking from doing. It is a dialogue with understanding. “To recognize the dialectic is to recognize that realities are never isolated entities standing in a linear, causal relationship to one another” (Crotty 1998 p.118). So digging deep towards the boundaries in this definition I do find something I can grab onto. If I define the word facilitating as creating an environment that is suitable for exploration and the democratic use of technology, and not the control as might formally be the case, then I can connect to this definition. I struggle with our societies desire to improve performance with a need to be efficient about collecting data that demonstrates measurable achievement. My study will not measure performance, on the contrary it will be more about making connections in a more nebulous way. It is hoped that the understanding that will be revealed from my work will be knowledge constructed and connected in the activity of shared understanding in the power of stories.

That being said I would like to bring my sense of self and my confusion to this definition and place all of it out on the edges of this framework where it may reside within the words study and reflective practice. “That is study refers to information gathering and analysis beyond the traditional conceptions of research” (2008, p. 1). Out on the edges on the boundary of what Clandinin & Connelly (2000) call a formalistic view. Here I feel the tension between worlds.

References Today are:

Clandinin, D. G., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Crotty, M. (1998). The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process. London ; Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Januszewski, A., Molenda, M., & Association for Educational Communications and Technology. (2008). Educational technology : a definition with commentary. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

21st Century - you know...

2010-04-06T07:11:00.003-06:00

I wish we could call it something else but this video fills me with hope. I wonder when we will think like this in Alberta?

A Self-Study Method?

2010-03-30T16:53:00.006-06:00

The Problem:
“Why when we are asked as teachers to be innovative with technology we are not?”
The Question:
“What conditions need to be in place to support an innovative technology classroom?”
The Method:
Self-Study?

I have been called an innovator when it comes to student use of technology in my elementary classroom yet I feel more pressure each day to teach and measure my students work by traditional methods, as well I doubt my own strengths and abilities for integration. My ideas and concerns seemed to be trapped in my own classroom. In the Alberta Programs of Studies (1995-2009) teachers currently are being asked to make a fundamental shift in our practice away from a teacher centred delivery of content to a more generative and collaborative exploration of content. This shift the curriculum requests requires a major adjustment of the traditional power relationship between myself and my students. We are also being asked in the Learning and Technology Policy Framework to “develop the competencies to integrate technology successfully into their teaching and to guide students in the use of technology to achieve learning goals”(2004).Even though I am willing why is it so difficult for me to connect my student’s questions to the current read and write tools I know are available through technology and how do I share my story with others? There have been many arguments for and against the use and cost of technology in classrooms but all of that in my mind is completely beside the point. We live in a technological world and all of us need to learn how to participate in it and that means learning to use the authoring tools available through web 2.0 technologies, yet if seems so hard. This question is extremely personal, yet I do not believe that I am alone with this question. I am not looking for a universal truth but a shared one. I also believe the only way to get inside of this problem is to reflect on the borders of my own practice and experience and mix it up with dialogue with teachers who are attempting to be innovative .

Given my assumptions as a teacher/researcher I believe the method I need, will involve collaborative dialogue where I bring my experience as a classroom teacher along as a resource. I think it will be kind of an improvisational critical autoethnography. Too wordy I know, but in using the term improvisational I am not referring to jazz music per say. It just means that the way I am looking at my problem is coming from the interpretive nature of social research; it will allow me to be reflective about my own situation and contains the notion of shared understanding and lived knowledge. I use the word critical to mean that it is not enough to merely describe this issue; I hope to bring about change. And autoethnography speaks to the first hand knowledge I need to answer this question and the need to examine my question with others in the place it exists. However this place is personal, I am the subject (knower) and also the object (place) so while I need to bring my own voice I will not understand without the inclusion of other voices. Explanations may contain the seeds to solutions but people are the solutions to the problems that confront us. I want to see if a narrative study with other teachers can be not just a meaning making event but a catalyst for change in our own practice.

I could also approach this problem from a narrative inquiry tradition. Can I make myself (the narrator) the protagonist as an actor in this story? As I am to understand a narrative inquiry is verbal action, “a process of collaboration involving mutual storytelling and re-storying as the research proceeds. In the process of beginning to live the shared story of narrative inquiry, the researcher needs to be aware of constructing a relationship in which both voices are heard” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990 p.4). This description underlines the importance of relationship in research and social construction, a relationship in which both teachers and researchers feel cared for and have a voice with which to tell their stories.

Then again the method that seems to be the most functional fit at this point is self-study. Self-study is an extension of both narrative and reflective practice. It goes beyond normal professional development and it speaks to a much wider audience and consideration of ideas (p. 106 Craig 2006). In the end I need to take my practice somewhere else because of this experience. It is important to tell my story but to be changed by the telling. What makes this method useful to me is that it is a sequence of reflective moments. It will allow me to place my personal problem out in public. There with collaborative, critical voices it can be reframed and redefined in community because of this participation. It will be a shared adventure. It will not be an expert-novice relationship or just critical friends. In this case I need to assume a ‘working with’ stance through narrative threads. In self-study, “The participants will be jointly involved in developing the study and learning through collaborative experiences (Loughran, J., & Northfield, J. 1998 p.14-15).

Critical Questions:

Can I create the kind of collaborative experience that is required for self-study? Can I make my personal struggle to make sense of my practice with the current ICT curriculum public? Who will share it with me? How will I find my critical friends? What will they get out of this experience? How will I measure what I gained at the end of my research?

Any thoughts anyone?

Some theoretical roots

Dewey
• Teacher as ‘knower’
• Knowledge is embedded in situation revised through social interaction and adapted over time
Schön
• Reflective practitioner

Alberta Learning. (2000-2003). Information and communication technology, kindergarten to grade 12: Program of studies. Curriculum Standards

Alberta Learning. (1995-2009). Programs of Study. http://education.alberta.ca/teachers/program.aspx

Alberta Learning. (2004). Learning and technology policy framework. http://www.learning.gov.ab.ca/reading/policy/techframework

Craig, C.J. (2006). Change, Changing, and Being Changed: A Self-study of a teacher educator’s becoming real in the throes of urban school reform (pp.105-116). Houston: Routledge.

Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational
Researcher, 19(5), 2–14.

Ham, V., & Davey, R. (2004, June). Are we the very models of the modern teacher educator? Paper presented at the fifth international conference on Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices,
Herstmonceux Castle, England

Loughran, J., & Northfield, J. (1998). A framework for the development of self-study practice.
In M. L. Hamilton (Ed.), Reconceptualizing teaching practice: Self-study for teacher education
(pp. 7–18). London: Falmer Press. Google Books

Does your work belong to you?

2010-02-15T18:55:00.002-07:00

A question for teachers: Does your work or your learning belong to you?

While attending my teacher’s convention this week I was sitting with a question, “Does my work belong to me?”. I had been reading about critical inquiry from a Marxist heritage. However I live in this world as a teacher who was looking for professional development so everything I read I placed around my situation carefully. Since my work is learning, it was not long before the question changed itself to read, “Do you own your own learning?”. While I carted my laptop around looking for wireless connections so that I could connect to my professional learning network I realized, no I do not. While many speakers this year spoke about the power of social networks for student learning no one thought about wireless networking for teacher learning. If what we want from people today is to live well in a connected world full of ambiguity we need our teachers to become learners and connect them to each other and the information that they want when they need it.

I believe something is a miss in the world of teaching and learning, something that needs to change for teachers to feel autonomous in their own workplace. Margaret Weatley says, “People are the solutions to the problems that confront us (2009 p. 23). I have been reflecting on this interpretively as a doctoral student and classroom teacher. Michael Crotty (1998) relates that interpretive research merely seeks to understand, and does not challenge, it reads a situation in terms of interaction and community not in the terms of conflict or oppression, it also accepts a status quo and does not seek to bring about change (p.113). That fills me with concern. I have been thinking interpretively about school reform and technology integration. While I do not believe teachers are oppressed in any way I do see many ways they are alienated in a world full of one way musts. Why is it so hard for teacher’s questions to be asked? It is my wish to awaken and understanding the complex situation teachers find themselves in. I want deeply to do this in terms of the conflict that I see teachers living in. I wish to describe, analyze, and open to scrutiny what otherwise might lie hidden out of sight without my participation. I wish to revisit the assumptions we have about teachers using technology in their classrooms for inquiry because I believe something needs to change and I do not think anything will change unless we treat teachers as learners and invite their voices into research by using a method to collect and connect wisdom from each other in reflection.

While at convention and seeing fellow teachers I had lost track with, I was reminded of the power of community and connections to each other as people. As a researcher I am drawn to a dialectical method as a tool to collect data from teachers. This method with all its variations generally views the whole of reality as an evolving process. As I understand it the premise of a dialectical argument is that participants, even if they do not agree, they at least share some common ground of meanings and experience. Connections then need to be shaped by me. I am not interested in an objective depiction of what some might call a stable “other”. There is nothing stable about teaching in today’s classroom. Instead, I want to encourage reflection in a collaborative fashion that would give teachers multiple opportunities to dialogue, in a kind of improvisational critical ethnography about technology use and the assumptions we have about it in the classroom.

In my current work environment at a recent professional development session the administration introduced us to something called, “Fierce Conversations”. I can't say that I really understand this fierceness but according to author Susan Scott you are either: Successful, flat lining or failing. Is that it? Scott is quoted as saying that interpersonal difficulties - at work and at home - are a direct result of our inability to communicate well. Perhaps, if all we want to do is talk at people without listening to them, but a good life is complex, this linear thinking does not describe the many ways we can be successful. “To recognize the dialectic is to recognize that realities are never isolated entities standing in a linear, causal relationship to one another” (Crotty 1998 p.118). The truth is that teaching comes from a servant-master tradition. The ones in charge have the ideas that are communicated toward the one doing the work. As teachers we have been expected to listen to what is said to us not the other way around. I find this thinking like driving on a road where traffic can only flow in one direction. There is not a lot of choice in where you end up. A good place for top down reform possibly, but where on this road is a place for pausing for reflection and opening a place for fierce listening? Life is nebulous and the world of teaching is complex. Complexities need to be recognized and nurtured. To look at teaching as this, that and the other thing, is not very prosperous. Scott speaks from the corporate world of business. Business is rightly concerned with data driven decision-making because it makes sense if you are only concerned with the bottom line. I wonder what place this philosophy has in schools. Is it our place as teachers to put achievement and accountability before our responsibility to support our students to become democratic citizens and encourage voice in our students? According to the government of Alberta’s guide to education (2010) “Our education system must simultaneously prepare the citizens of tomorrow while equipping our students with the knowledge and skills they need to be successful in a rapidly changing economy and society” (p. 5). How do we do this with out doing it our selves? At the end of the day I wish to take back my work from all of those that tell me it belongs to them. I want also to feel comfortable to ask questions in my place of work in order to personalize my teaching and my own learning.

This thinking has been inspired by

Calgary City Teachers Convention tweets :http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23cctc
Dennis Shirley of Boston College
My friends Barb and Judy

Teacher as Learner?

2010-01-24T12:37:00.005-07:00

The following is a critical reflection to reading, “What did you do in school today?” Teaching effectiveness: A framework May 2009, sponsored by the Canadian Education Association, in partnership with the Canadian Council on Learning and school districts across Canada. They focus on the idea of student engagement in the classroom, and explore the relationship with adolescent learning, student achievement, and effective teaching. They make a clear distinction between intellectual and academic engagement. On their website http://www.cea-ace.ca/res.cfm?subsection=wdy they remind us that. “Students have a better educational experience when teachers and students actively collaborate in the process of improvement.” A lived knowledge of self with embedded assessment. In addition, “Teaching is incredibly complex and today’s teachers are called upon to work with their colleagues to design learning environments that promote deeper engagement in learning as a reciprocal process among teachers and students”.

Throughout my 26-year career as a teacher there has always been a push for some sort of school reform. In the Alberta Programs of Studies (1995-2009) teachers currently are being asked to make a fundamental shift in their practice away from a teacher centred delivery of content to a more generative and collaborative exploration of content. They also are being asked in the Learning and Technology Policy Framework to “develop the competencies to integrate technology successfully into their teaching and to guide students in the use of technology to achieve learning goals”(2004). All of this requires a major adjustment in not just the traditional power relationship between teacher and student but also a shift in teacher as transmitter, to teacher as learner. It is not clear to me that we recognize the depth of shift in practice and the skill required by many generations of teachers relating to the infusion of digital technologies into learning and teaching let alone inquiry. To add to this complexity, in the program of studies teachers are asked to build a learning community and develop capacity for personalized learning, while demanding a standardized practice. There have been major shifts in our thinking of knowledge in the post-industrial age. In her brief history of ideas about teaching Friesen speaks of the traditions our current education system was built on. Many in education today still value scientific management as a model for teaching and learning. In the article chapter one reminds us that standardized practice is dedicated to the value of efficiency. Sorting learners into levels for learning and judging them through a standard method. It seeks higher and higher goals in what may become a data driven, top down non-negotiable environment. In this place knowledge is seen as something that can be improved through repetition and validity comes from being able to do it again.

Teaching for today’s world alerts us of the need for change. Many researchers have the same concern. In “Teaching in the knowledge society”, Andy Hargreaves (2003) argues that teaching in the knowledge society involves cultivating these capacities in young people; developing deep cognitive learning, creativity, and ingenuity among students”. He believes also teachers need to work in networks and teams, and pursue continuous professional learning. He feels they need an environment that promotes “problem-solving, risk taking, trust in the collaborative process, ability for to cope with change and commitment to continuous improvement as organizations” (p. 3). He also cautions that teachers can not make this shift without the support of good professional development. The kind of support that happens in a culture of caring, grounded in long-term relationships of trust, foundations of security, and commitments to active care (p. 170). Not top down reform that seems empty of shared wisdom, a place of musts, where teachers are told they must do things the same, they must collaborate rather than opening conversations to allow it to occur naturally. A standard place where diversity is ignored. In this place a teacher may feel disconnected from their own learning and decisions being made around them. A place where others think deeply and you just do what you are told.

Knowledge is now seen as flexible and ever expanding. It has shifted from being a thing or something to go and get and prove you have on a test to a kind of energy and a key form of work (Gilbert 2007). Historically in school we have focused on knowledge as a thing in academic engagement and done a poor job dealing with the capacity of knowledge and intellectual engagement. We have also focused mainly on student engagement alone and not teacher as learner. In order for this shift to take hold in our classrooms, teachers need to not just think of themselves as learners they need also to be treated as such. They also need to feel connected to the questions they have about learning and not be blocked from digital connections such as social networking. I argue that the shift required in education must include the teacher shifting from deliverer of content, to demonstrator of how to learn what we want to know, when we want to know it. How to manage and organize one’s knowledge (information literacy) becomes a new skill for this century. Students today do not want to memorize information. They want and need to build their own personal knowledge, and thus need to know how to retrieve it when required. They need to develop multi-modal literacy, in order to be seen, heard and read by other both synchronous and asynchronously. Learners are finding flow in their personal lives outside of school and boredom inside. Finally what good is knowing something without doing something with it or sharing it with others in our connected world. I believe at the most important thing we need of schools in the 21st century is to teach our students to become participatory citizens. In this they do need to learn academically but they also need to feel connected to what they learn and each other. Not a linear cause and effect world, but a nebulously connected world.

Referenced in this post:

Alberta Learning. (2000-2003). Information and communication technology, kindergarten to grade 12: Program of studies. Curriculum Standards

Alberta Learning. (1995-2009). Programs of Study. http://education.alberta.ca/teachers/program.aspx

Alberta Learning. (2004). Learning and technology policy framework. http://www.learning.gov.ab.ca/reading/policy/techframework

Jane Gilbert. (2007, July). "CATCHING THE KNOWLEDGE WAVE" REDEFINING KNOWLEDGE FOR THE POST-INDUSTRIAL AGE. Education Canada, 47(3), 4-8. Retrieved January 23, 2010, from ProQuest Education Journals. (Document ID: 1296660451).

Friesen, S. (2009). What did you do in school today? Teaching effectiveness:A framework and rubric http://www.cea-ace.ca/media/en/WDYDIST_Teaching_EN.pdf

Hargreaves, A. (2003). Teaching in the knowledge society. Teachers College Press.

Also
Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow state is a special detached state of consciousness, in which you are aware only of the moment, of activity and of the sheer enjoyment. To find flow one needs to find the right balance between challenge and skill.

Teachers as Catalyst

2010-01-03T08:51:00.003-07:00

A question I keep returning to, the one that seems to be at the root of all other questions is; how do we live well together? With all the complexities of contemporary life with all the diversity required for a good life, how do we learn to get along, and how do we as teachers prepare our students to be participatory citizens in the 21st century? At times it feels that our society has squeezed the democracy out of school. With so much emphasis on getting ahead, keeping up and doing it faster are we really interested in taking care of each other? I found myself recently on top of a ski hill with this thought about community. Skiers and snowboarders will know that moguls are carved slowly through a season of collective effort; they are formed as a kind of “collective intelligence” if you will in the snow. There is no power of one here only the many that have left a whisper of their presence behind. It is in the voices of the many we may find connection to each other. Dialogue and the sharing of our stories in narrative also over time form a shared understanding. Expert skiers will tell you that they trust the wisdom of previous skiers and follow their path laid down before them while at the same time leaving something of them selves behind. The wisdom that is left behind for me in my research will make up my literature review.
In a previous post I discuss the need for school in the 21st Century. I wrote, “teachers are being asked to make a fundamental shift in their practice away from a teacher centred delivery of content to a more generative and collaborative exploration of content.” Yet as a classroom teacher I find myself in a place between this and what appears to me a data driven, top down non-negotiable environment where I struggle as a teacher to find my autonomy and creativity. A place empty of shared wisdom, a place of musts, where I am told I must collaborate and personalize learning. I am disconnected from decisions and the authority that says I must provide students with choice, yet I wonder where is my opportunity for choice?

What should I call this place? Andy Hargreaves (2003) refers to this as teaching for a knowledge society, a professional paradox.

To add to this, Alberta teachers will soon find a new technology in education policy to work with. In the rational of the draft of this new policy states, “To achieve success and fulfillment as citizens in this ever‐changing complex society, students need to be self‐directed lifelong learners, critical thinkers, and problem solvers. Communication and collaboration skills will be essential. Students will also need to be flexible, creative and innovative as they adapt to the changes around them… Preparing students with these competencies requires that educators design a variety of relevant learning experiences that engage students in productive inquiry through the use of technology.” In addition the first goal of technology in education it mandates the development of digitally confident leaders and educators (p.12). I am left to wonder what professional development plans are being made to support teachers in this confidence?

Hargreaves states that, “Deep professional learning involves more than workshops… it requires time to understand, learn about, and reflection on what the change involves and requires” (p108). This process involves more than just doing what you are told and applying what other have taken the time to think deeply about. It is about taking ownership of your own learning by have choice in the first place in what you want to be curious about. You can’t be a confident learner if you are constantly shoulder checking who is watching. Planting the seeds of change in this soil would give it shallow roots.
Technology has the potential to be a democratic tool to understanding, and teachers have the potential to be a catalyst for change. Is it not time to stop blaming teachers from the hallways of schools for their lack of confidence with technology and being barriers for student digital citizenship and get into the classrooms and start talking to them? What can we learn and perhaps understand by dialoguing with teachers about this place?

I was unable to find a direct source of the Alberta Education Draft Technology in Education Policy but the ATA has published an initial response in the form of a PDF to it at: http://www.teachers.ab.ca/SiteCollectionDocuments/ATA/Features/2009-10/Initial%20Response%20to%20Alberta%20Education%20Draft%20Technology%20in%20Education%20Policy.pdf

Hargreaves, A. (2003). Teaching in the knowledge society. Teachers College Press.

Instructionism versus Constructionism?

2009-12-06T17:40:00.004-07:00

I am not a big fan of the word versus, I think perhaps I could have used the title constructionism born out of Instructionism but that does not sound so exciting. Regardless here is this weeks thinking:

Instructionisn versus Constructionism

There is a notion out there in schools that if we want better learning, we need to just do what we have been doing for the last century better, more efficiently. Just do teaching better. This notion leads us to wonder how do we know we are better? We better find a measuring stick. If we want to be more efficient then we better measure how we are more efficient. We end up in a maze circling around and around like a laboratory rat chasing after better.

Well maybe but perhaps it would be more helpful to think about this in a less linear way. Let’s take the cause and effect out of this scenario and shake this thinking on its backside. At the core of this is what do you personally believe learning to be? Do you believe in universal truths? Basically how do we view the nature of knowledge?

Constructionism does not say do not instruct, any teacher will tell you that would just be silly. Constructionism removes a layer though by keeping instruction to a minimum, so that the acts of teaching not diminish the act of discovery by the student. Seymour Papert comments, “of course this can not be achieved by reducing the quantity of teaching while leaving everything else unchanged”. We need to think differently. He reminds us that the constructionist principal parallels the African proverb if a man is hungry you can give him a fish or teach him to fish. Traditional school gives children the fish while constructionism is built on the assumption that students will do better if they find their own fish, realize what skills they need to learn to do this on their own, find friends to fish with and discover the best waters to fish in. “The kind of knowledge children most need is the knowledge that will help them get more knowledge” (Papert, 1993, p. 139).

The structure of a constructionist-learning environment is a dramatically different school culture, shifted away from transmission and acquisition towards a more active participatory place. Instead of placing importance on individual isolated knowledge it places importance on interaction and the appropriation of knowledge; its design is collaborative to allow for the sharing of ideas. It focuses on the connected nature of knowledge both personal and social. It has a more distributed view drawn from the greater surrounding culture. Rather than being linear and having students master stages of development the structure is bricoleur where the student learns to tinker with the tools at hand. Constructionism is not constructivism. “Piaget never intended his theory of knowledge development to be a theory of learning and teaching”(Kafai, 2006, p. 35). Instead of students learning through accommodation as Piaget spoke of, teachers will help learners make connections by making sense of the world as a whole that they interact with and not just objects in it. In this place learners have power to make knowledge their own. Authority then becomes distributed and not centrally located at the front of the room. The central role of constructionism is a physical one and the focus is on the people not the technology as an object. Technology potentially may become tools to think with and a place to connect knowledge. Giving each of us the potential to interact directly with a whole new world full of meanings. So what are schools doing to help teachers with this shift?

Roots of Constructionism explored with Cmap

This thinking was sparked by:

Kafai, Y. (2006). Constructionism. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Papert, S. (1993). The children's machine: Rethinking school in the age of computer. New York, NY, USA: Basic Books, Inc.

As a democratic society what is it we need of our schools in the 21st century?

2009-11-29T16:23:00.003-07:00

As a democratic society what is it we need of our schools in the 21st century and has our expectation of teachers shifted? The cost of technology is socially complex and expensive compared with the traditional tools of teaching. Is this cost bringing us closer to what we need? Do we need to re-examine the assumptions that are propelling reform through technology? Is it enough in our democratic society to just educate teachers and students in how to use technology?
On one hand, we have aspects of our society craving higher standards, with a need to be efficient about collecting data that demonstrates measurable achievement. In the Alberta Guide to Education document they state, “The school’s primary responsibility is to ensure that students meet or exceed the provincial standards… that education inspires and enables students to achieve success and fulfillment as citizens in a changing world.” (2009-2010 p.2).” In my view this indicates a standards-based, accountability-oriented approach concerned with effective delivery of this program of study and the teacher is responsible for collecting this data. http://education.alberta.ca/media/832568/guidetoed.pdf
Yet, at the same time looking deeper into the school curriculum teachers are being asked to make a fundamental shift in their practice away from a teacher centred delivery of content to a more generative and collaborative exploration of content. This shift requires a major adjustment of the traditional power relationship between teacher and student.
As a classroom teacher, I find myself uncomfortably squeezed between the two. Do teachers find themselves trapped in a paradoxical profession as Andy Hargreaves boldly states (2003, p. 9)? Do we as a society have a clear request of its teachers or has teaching in the 21st century become so complex we are confused? Alberta teachers are being asked to embed technology into every area of their curriculum. “As technology is best learned within the context of applications, activities, projects, and problems that replicate real-life situations, the ICT program of studies is structured as a ‘curriculum within a curriculum’, using the core subjects of English Language Arts, Math, Science and Social Studies as a base” (2003 p.1). Yet much research suggests there are barriers to teachers doing so. What might explain some teachers eagerly infusing technology and others not? Is Larry Cuban correct when he reports that computers have been over sold and under used by teachers (2001 p.195). As well, in their examination of the use of computers by teachers Dexter, Anderson, & Becker uncovered from teachers that they felt time to reflect was more of a catalysts than the technology itself for instructional change in teacher practice (1999).
If technology is not the catalyst what might be? I think it might be time to stop thinking that teachers are the obstacles to over come in school reform? Do we take seriously the experiences of teachers? If explanations contain the seeds for solutions, can I as a researcher explain or rather interpret for school reformers the teachers voice in this place? In the heart of this question I wonder, what do teachers say about of the relationship between technology and exploratory learning in constructionist classrooms today?

Cuban, L. (2001). Oversold and underused: computers in the classroom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Dexter, S., Anderson, R. E., & Becker, H. J. (1999). Teachers' views of computers as catalysts for changes in their teaching practice. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 31(3), 221-239.
Hargreaves, A. (2003). Teaching in the knowledge society. Teachers College Press.

All I needed to learn I learned in my backyard

2009-11-11T19:04:00.003-07:00

I wrote this for my father on the occasion of his funeral September 12. 2007. I publish it now to honour his memory as a WWII veteran on this Remembrance day 2009.

The lessons I learned in my backyard

My father was a kind man, a good guy. He wasn't what you would call ambitious, he wasn't driven to climb the corporate ladder. He was a good man. In today's society good has become a kind of undervalued word. But good is good, and good is a good word. He was a family man and from my perspective a top level father. It wasn't enough that he fathered us he also fathered our friends. He wasn't alone, I remember thinking the same thing about Mr. Boydell. As a child I spent a lot of time in my backyard and I'll tell you my father's presence was always there even when he wasn't. In those days our parents would open the back door after breakfast and if we were home by the time the streetlights where on all was good. At some point lunch would happen but I don't have much of a memory of that. When it was time for my mother to prepare the family meal I was not to be found in the kitchen helping her. I was out on the front step waiting for my father to come home so the we could play catch. When he wasn't there I spent hours throwing the ball against the house. I now wonder what that must have sounded like to my mother inside the house. The time I spent with my father in my backyard was sacred.

In playing catch with my father I learned about the importance of anticipation, keeping your eye on the ball and covering
up. You know just in case life throws you a bouncing ball. You have
heard the expression covering all your bases and you never know when
life will throw you a curve ball. I learned to be ready to be prepared for the
unexpected from my father.

From my father in my backyard I learned that all life has a place and an importance in creation. Life is a circle with nothing having dominion over another what ever we humans think. However as the children of Ross Grant we learned that cats have some sort of special place at least in our laps.

In my backyard I learned that trees can be your friend. You can play with them. And if you listen very carefully they will whisper your name. They will seldom let you down. We had several trees in our backyard. In one of them we made a simple tree fort
and a rope swing. Not sure I had anything to do with the construction. However in my backyard with this tree I learned the important lesson of gravity it sucks. I have a
memory of one day that rope broke while I was swinging. My hand just
melted. I also recall one day waking up in my bed with the worried
faces of my family all around. Apparently I fell out of the fort and
gave myself some sort of concussion. In the presence of our family and friends hurts heal faster. I am sure some of you have your own memory of that tree different from my own. I also remember sparklers and burning school houses with the Boydell's very close to that tree, what where we thinking?

You have heard of March madness? I have a different take on it. Yes in March it is time for American college basketball to decide who is the best, but in my backyard it meant the changing of the seasons. My father would make a backyard rink every winter for us. You see in March it is also the time when in Canada we find out who is the best in figure skating. I would watch the championship on television and when it was done for the evening I would go out in my backyard and skate on what was left of the ring. That was madness, sometimes it was only 5 feet around. I spent time there from the time before I could walk to the time I wore high heels. From my father I learned about balance and starting with a good foundation and building on that. In my life I attempt to keep a balance not between work and home but around all life. It's all good. All of it.

My father taught me the art of quite listening and auditory discrimination. In my backyard learned to listen to the difference between bird songs. Robins have a song to sing and it is different in the morning from the evening. It's different when their young are on the ground and it's different when they say goodbye to us in the fall. All winter I wait for the return of the robin's song so that I can tell my father I heard it. It isn't spring until I do. I also learned to whistle although I have never heard a sweeter sound than my father whistling.

Now I want to talk about the focal point of our backyard. All the seasons where revered in our backyard but we all could not wait for the warmth of spring. When the earth would open up so that we could plant the peas. The first seeds of spring. All seeds have a place and an importance in creation but my family will tell you that garden peas have a special place on our tongues. I won't even talk about tomatoes but they have to wait for the warmer soil of June. My father was not a great gardener, he didn't always have straight rows and he didn't pull all the weeds. However he just was a gardener. He had such a connection to the earth and creation. He taught me that seeds, like children grow into what they are meant to be, they don't need a label to know what they are, they don't need straight rows to grow in. They just need to be planted, watered, watched and cared for. With that care they will grow into what they are meant to be.

I believe I learned about honour and duty from my father. In 1939 war was declared and he was 21 years old. That is how old my son is now. He was working at Timothy Eaton's in Hamilton when he was called up for 30 days service in the army. He did his required time and then returned to work. In the summer of 1941 there was a big crop of hay that year his sense of family called him to returned to the farm to help his father but then he also felt a call to serve his country away from his family. His sense of what was right sent him back to the armed forces and in the fall of 1941 like many young men he joined the Air force. He didn't talk about it much but he didn't go into battle, he just quietly when around the North of England making sure the radar was working. That's how he was, he just quietly went about doing good things. I have discovered that radar technicians were Canada's gift to the war effort and it was radar that ended the war.

I live far away in Calgary but even there I am close to my father. All I need to do is put my hand in the dirt to feel his presence. All I need to do is hear my son whistle to hear his voice, or cut open a tomato I have grown to understand life is a circle. When you go home today spend some time in your backyard pour a glass of something cool raise a toast to creation. Spend a few moments thinking about the lessons you have learned there. Look around and notice what is growing and living in your backyard and be filled with the sense of wonder that you should. Life is amazing, drink it in, smell it, listen to it, today all creation sings as it does everyday.

Just what is school for any way?

2009-10-31T12:09:00.000-06:00

What is school for in the 21st century and what do we ask of its teachers? On one hand, we have aspects of our society craving higher standards, with a deep need to be more efficient about collecting data that proves growth. This side tends to seek technocratic solutions to its questions and technology is a means towards an end. Yet, at the same time school curriculum is asking teachers to make a fundamental shift in their practice from a teacher centred delivery of content to a more generative, collaborative exploration into content. This shift requires a major adjustment of the traditional power relationship between teacher and student. This side tends to seek democratic solutions to its questions; technology can be used to connect us. As a classroom teacher, I find myself uncomfortably squeezed between the two. Do teachers find themselves trapped in a paradoxical profession? Do we as a society have a clear request of its teachers or has teaching in the 21st century become so complex we are confused?
If explanations contain the seeds for solutions, can I as a researcher explain for the world the some of the complexities of the 21st century classroom, as teachers try to be responsive to all learners?

We are all connected

2009-10-28T18:32:00.003-06:00

Found this thanks to Stephen Downes. It must be shared.

We are all connected... The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

A pragmatic thread

2009-10-20T19:32:00.004-06:00

While reading Michael Crotty’s chapter on Interpretivism, he reminded me that the pragmatic world that I place myself in is one of optimistic possibility. It is a world to explore and made the most of, not a world to be subjected to radical criticism (p.74). It is true that some times the world does need to be criticized and there are aspects of human life that make interesting subjects, but on the whole human life is ripe with potential both good, bad and every thing above and below. To look at human life with a subjective view while it can be helpful it is limiting. At best it only tells us half the story. To look at the world this way we must also look at how we as humans connect to each other. We are a people connected through culture and language. To effectively participate in this culture we must see ourselves as social beings capable of a connection (some don't). This bond to our culture and thus to each other is made possible when we use our imaginations, when we put ourselves in a new place, a place that has potential, it is a place of many possibilities. The world is bountiful, teeming with possibility (p.85). What makes us human is the ability to take the role of another. We are capable of placing ourselves in someone else’s shoes and walk around a while. We can think inside our heads and wonder what it must be like over there. I see children do this rather successfully in their play. They think, believe then become like the character they want to play. This link we have with each other has been called symbolic interaction (p. 75). I have discovered that the notion of symbolic interaction while having its origin in the pragmatic movement is not unique to it. It is a thread that runs from pragmatism through ethnography, interactionism, phenomenology and right into hermeneutics, the path that I feel my research will take.

Crotty, M. (1998). The foundations of social research : meaning and perspective in the research process. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif., Sage Publications.

Be strong, be brave

2009-10-19T19:49:00.002-06:00

Today was an emotional day for me. My 20 year old daughter got on a plane today to leave for Michigan to go to school there. I will not see her until Christmas. This was hard for me some how. I mean we all know as parents that they will grow up and leave. It became a little unsettling when she texted me to say that she missed her plane while customs grilled her over her going early. I received the text while I was teaching my grade two class. I talked to them about my concern. One child said to me quite clearly and profoundly. "I think it will be ok. You are big and you should be brave and you should be strong." Oh, I said to myself I guess I will then since you put it that way. We as teachers need to remember that children can teach us. They can remind us of what we need to know to make everything ok. My daughter got on the next plane. She did leave and everything is going to be all right. I will miss her but I will never forget the lesson one 7 year old taught me today. Be brave and be strong and everything will be all right.

Thinking, creating, and invention?

2009-10-12T10:39:00.004-06:00

Imagine teaching and learning as an environment or a place with rooms to play, and in this place picture the focal point being thinking, creating, and invention? Could we then think of technology as being the medium for this work?

Marshal McLuhan (1967) alerted my generation of a shift of philosophy four decades ago. “The environment as a processor of information is propaganda. Propaganda ends where dialogue begins. You must talk to the media, not the programmer” (p.142). What I gather from this wisdom is that if I want to understand what is happening in education with regard to technology I must dialogue with teachers not the system they work in.

Perhaps why we struggle with this philosophy might be because our culture and school system as deep roots the industrial model and the philosophy of technology as an instrument. With it’s focus on data driven productivity, accountability and efficiency. In this place, teachers have had little choice then to break knowledge into packages; teaching then became the supplying of this information while learning in turn became the mastering of this information. In this place, there was a need to standardize in order to measure how effective teachers were being. This sort of system appeared to be functioning when we thought of information as being in short supply. However, in today’s information rich world this is less than effective. So how do we achieve this shift of philosophy?
The first step in any solution is coming to an understanding of the place the problem lives. I wish to arrive at an understanding dialogically by engaging together with teachers as a means of thinking and reflecting on the daily complexities in the classroom and experiences in the contexts of a shared social and moral traditions. I wish to have my dialogue with teachers in a deliberate and democratic manner. In this case, I wish to put my own understanding at risk and to leave myself open to possibilities.
Jourard (1978) as a voice from the past cautions, “The crisis of our time is not shortage of food, space, and energy; it is the failure of dialogue”. This makes me think not much has really changed. He describes education as a dialogue. “It is an invitation for someone, living or dead, to engage in a process which enlarges one’s perspective”. He says it implies a capacity to imagine, or "tune in to the reality of what is being said, the phenomenological reality of the speaker’s world”. Dialogue calls us to listen and to speak a truth in response. He says this sharing is not the imposing of ones own ideas on to another as I have often seen done in many situations where teachers have been asked to infuse technology in their practice. Further, he reminds us that in education everything depends upon the educators’ beliefs about who their pupils are and who they can become. Can we not also think of teachers as learners themselves? How often do we ask who do teachers believe themselves to be? (p.47). These words inspire me. In his words, “education is concerned with discovering and calling forth those human potentialities deemed valuable for life” (p. 48). “To really listen, we need to still the chronic noise of our mind, which always labels and categorizes what the world is and what we are” (p. 50). While my research will not just be about listening to teacher’s it will be a requirement of it. He reminds us that reading is also a listening as well as a looking, tasting, feeling, and smelling. All of this is just part of hearing what the world of teaching is and what it is like.

Jourard, S. M. (1978). Education as dialogue. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 18(1), 47.

McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q. (1967). The medium is the massage. New York: Bantam Books.

Playful Experience

2009-10-10T16:15:00.003-06:00

I do not think it is helpful to view play through the limiting eyes of subjectivity. Gadamer (2004) frees play from traditional subjective understandings. Play is more than an entity of itself and not just a state of mind or an orientation of the one playing. It has a spirit of its own. “Play itself contains its own, even sacred, seriousness…Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in the play” (p.102). In this seriousness of play, we suspend our daily connections with world. As players, we know we are playing, but the only goal other than to just play is for the player to be “played” by the game itself. This kind of focus is required in order to make play wholly play. “Someone who doesn’t take the game seriously is a spoilsport” (p.103). In this sort of manner of play, we must not look upon the word play as if it were an object. It becomes an event. Dewey might call it the action of play. Without action, there can be no experience, and it is what gives this very ordinary everyday activity its ultimate constructive power.

(Biesta & Burbules, 2003) describe that Dewey used the word experience to refer to the transaction between living organisms and their environment. It is the very way we are connected to reality and knowledge (p. 28). “Knowledge is therefore found in the happenings of experience” (p. 44). I cannot see how one could consider them selves knowledgeable without being engaged in the playful act of learning. Gadamer speaks of two different kinds of experience. An immediate experience you might have with a tool or instrument (Erlebnis) and a different deeper or more cognitive experience you undergo the result of participating in an action (Erfahrung). While I see great value the first experience, it is the playful experience of a lived experience that I am interested in with my research. I must be present but also active in my research.

Biesta, J., & Burbules, N. (2003). Pragmatism and educational research. Toronto: Roman and Littlefield.

Gadamer, H., Weinsheimer, J., & Marshall, D. G. (2004). Truth and method (Vol. 2). London ; New York: Continuum.

More on Playful Knowledge

2009-10-04T20:20:00.004-06:00

I am an educational technologist. The AECT Defines educational technology as, “The study and ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using and managing appropriate technological processes and resources” (Januszewski, A., Molenda, M., 2008 p.1) What that means to me is that as an elementary classroom teacher I have been able to embed my teaching and learning inside a technological framework. At times I do use technology as a tool to support instruction but I also view technology as a place for student centred exploration and construction. As the teacher I believe it is my responsibility to create and then facilitate a learning environment that my students can be interactive in. I also believe that for meaningful learning to occur they need to use technology to make connections to each other and the information that drives their curiosity. I can also say quite confidently that I now see this work through the lens of an interpretive researcher. By that I mean I view teaching and learning as deeply linked. Deep learning is personal yet socially constructed. As learners we need opportunity to dialogue with each other and what we understand as knowledge. Play is an action. We must poke, push and pull at our understanding. Interpretive work is playful work. Play is not subjective or objective but a constructed pursuit. Play is what we must do in order to make knowledge our own and not someone else’s. Interpretive research looks for culturally derived and historically situated interpretations of the social life-world (Crotty p.67). I do not wish to explain how teachers are using technology in the 21st century as much as I wish to understand it. There has already been much fine research in educational technology that explains the barriers that teachers face when trying to utilize technology in their classrooms. Yet much of this comes from a scientific tradition and has been accomplished through a natural science method focused on causality and empirical validation. While this research pool is rich with useful and interesting data, I believe it is missing something vital to help us understand the life-world of teachers today. Little is said about the complexities of today’s classroom and little is heard from the voice of the teachers who live in this complexity. For me explanations are ineffectual without being surrounded with understanding.

Crotty, M. (1998). The foundations of social research : meaning and perspective in the research process. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif., Sage Publications.

Januszewski, A., M. Molenda, et al. (2008). Educational technology : a definition with commentary. New York, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

It feels wrong

2009-09-26T09:50:00.006-06:00

It all feels wrong to me. I wonder why do I feel so uncomfortable when my staff is talking about gaps in our students skills? We need to identify gaps in order to build a school development plan. This should be a good thing shouldn't it? If we want to support our students to be confident participants in the world we need to know what they are doing well and what is missing from their skill set. However I was shocked when what was written on the white board was there needs to be a balance between play and academics in kindergarten. A balance? When did it become a dichotomy? Play vs School? How can we possibly pull the playfulness out of learning as if it where something unrelated? Is "play" a thing now? How can we use an Inquiry approach without playful exploration?
In this blog I have made my view of knowledge well known. I do not think that play is a form of disengaged, disinterested activity of subjectivity. Play is a very serious path to understanding. I think my discomfort indicates that my philosophical beliefs are clashing with the dominate view of the school. While I find myself almost angry my curiosity is taking over. What is the philosophical beliefs of the school? What are the roots of this thinking? How are teachers like me coping with this disconnection? My plan is to now approach this phenomenologically. Why so much emphasis on behaviour? Why so much time spent on testing that will sort our students into leveled learning? How can a scientific model of quantifiable data support inquiry? What does inquiry mean to a behaviourist? What good is inquiry if we have not invested in creating collaborative environment where curiosity and exploration are valued as a way of being in the world?

Back in the classroom

2009-09-13T10:36:00.006-06:00

My dilemma - another rant:
So I now find myself back in the classroom after 3 years of busying my brain with doctoral thoughts. I have beliefs about the way we learn. I also have deep beliefs about the kind of schools I think we need to be in the 21st Century.
They go something like this:

"We need to stop thinking that the job of schools is to create the 21st century workforce, it's not. The job of our schools is nothing less than to help co-create the 21st-century citizen. We want our kids to be active, engaged citizens of the world. They'll be workers if they are that, too... that part will take care of itself. We want them to be able to engage in the world around them and to make it better. Nothing less than that is our task as educators."

- Chris Lehman

How ever I now have found myself back in the world of...

"the one hundred and one things I have to do every day and who do I need to please now?"

I feel the pressure to make the grade. To measure and to sort learners into little boxes. How can we expect students to be participants of a connected world if we look at them and their abilities as disconnected little packages of stuff? Schools today are a product of the past. If schools are to become the kind of schools we need... they really need to look hard at disconnecting from the scientific approach of sorting and classifying based on cause and effect testing and reconnect to the more nebulous approach of personal need driven exploratory learning. The only assessment worth doing is self assessment for personal learning within a community of learners.

Do I know what I need to know to do what I want to do?
Well do I? As a researcher in Educational Technology I know the world the teachers live in. You can not expect a teacher to have much time to think about teaching and learning in a digital age when in fact they also live in the world of... 101 things.

Technology using teacher characteristics:

2009-08-30T15:34:00.003-06:00

It is hoped that the work I do towards my doctorate will be a “little something” in the great and wonderful pool of work that has gone before me. It has occurred to me many times that this historical knowledge is the foundation and the firmness upon which I stand with strength. However if all of us do not take a moment to think about why we think what we think we get nowhere in our understanding about what we bring to the table of life. The world is rich and our understanding of our place on this planet is complicated by our experience with it. We need to take moments to ponder and question historical thinking.

That being said I wonder today just when did we think that a tool such as we call technology could change the way people work and think? What philosophy of technology is at the root of this thinking? Has technology become not just a tool for us to work with but also a place we live inside of?

I have noticed many school leaders and policy makers acting as if technology as a tool could be a catalyst for change in teacher practice. This action suggests that putting expensive technology in classrooms will shift the role of teachers and their students. That somehow the technology in the room will cause teachers to act more as facilitators by helping students access information, process it, and communicate their understanding. As a learning leader in the 21st century learning project that was not my experience. Placing technology at their doorstep even with professional support became more of a source for frustration for many teachers in their busy professional lives.

Literature for Technology as a catalyst for change:
Collins, A. (1991). The role of computer technology in restructuring schools. Phi Delta Kappan, 73, 28-36.
Means, B., Olson, K., & Singh, R. (1995). Beyond the classroom: Restructuring schools with technology. Phi Delta Kappan, 77, 69-72.
Mehlinger, H. (1996). School reform in the information age. Phi Delta Kappan, 77, 400-407.
Newman, D. (1992). Technology as support for school structure and school restructuring. Phi Delta Kappan, 74, 308-315.
Sheingold, K. (1991). Restructuring for learning with technology: The potential for synergy. Phi Delta Kappan, 73,17 –27.

I have seen much money, time and energy being spent on technology and professional development that seems to have adopted the philosophy, ‘build it and they will come”. So I am left to wonder when historically has a tool been a catalyst for change? As well to complicate this conversation not all teachers view technology only as a tool, and some teachers’ eagerly welcome technology into their classrooms.

I do not wish to approach my work looking at this problem dualistically but rather a succession or a non-linear continuum that I would like to think of as a field. The research on technology-using teachers characterizes different ways teachers use technology in their classrooms. Data that I have encountered so far suggest that technology-using teachers range along a continuum of instructional styles from instruction to construction.

On this continuum we find teachers who use technology only to instruct and then teachers who use technology to construct knowledge. As with continuums we find many teachers at different points employing vastly different philosophies of technology.

Instructional Classroom:
In instruction, the research tells us that teachers conduct class in a teacher-centered way. They impart facts and procedural skills to students and integrate technology as a complement to this style. They use technology mainly for drill and practice. Technology is a means to an end. I believe historically this type of teaching comes from the notion that information and knowledge is limited, sorted and easily found by a “hide-an-seek” method of presenting the curriculum. Embedded within this notion is the philosophy that the technology should make us more efficient and more productive.

Constructional Classroom:
Research also tells us that in construction or student-centered classrooms, teachers are encouraging students to use software and information technologies to make personal connections in active ways. The technology supports the active learning; it becomes a tool with which the students may construct or grow knowledge. Technology can become a place for exploration and the means and ends are endlessly connected. I believe this type of teaching comes from the notion that information and knowledge is vast and complex, that we also need to learn strategies to navigate through it. Embedded within this notion is the philosophy that technology will connect us democratically. It is these constructivist characteristics we find in the 21st century classroom.

Literature for Technology using teacher characteristics:
Becker, H.J. (1994). How exemplary computer-using teachers differ from other teachers: Implications for realizing the potential of computers in schools. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 26, 291-321.
Hadley, M., & Sheingold, K. (1993). Commonalties and distinctive patterns in teachers’ integration of computers. American Journal of Education, 101, 261-315.
Honey, M., & Moeller, B. (1990). Teacher’s beliefs and technology integration: Different values, different understandings. CTE Technical Report Issue No. 6. [Online ] available: http://www.edc.org/CCT/ccthome/reports/tr6.html
Means, B., & Olson, K. (1995). Technology's role in education reform: Findings from a national study of innovating schools. Menlo Park, CA: SRI International. [Online] available: http://www.ed.gov/pubs/EdReformStudies/EdTech/
Wiske, M. S., Zodhiates, P., Wilson, B., Gordon, M., Harvey, W., Krensky, L., Lord, B., Watt, M. & Williams, K. (1988). How technology affects teaching. Cambridge, MA: Educational Technology Center. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 296 706)

My final question at the end of this conversation today is this: If the goal is for teachers to use technology with their students in a constructionist or democratic manner should we not first explore this issue with them in the same manner? What if we used a constructivist model rather than a scientific one as has often been done for this exploration. What if we began thinking of teachers as learners and then began a dialogue? Dialogues can provide important opportunities for constructing knowledge in collaboration because they may open opportunities for professional discourse to expose scrutinize and contest deeply ingrained assumptions and philosophies about the way they use technology.

The constructivist model emphasizes that new understanding occurs when a learner seeks, acquires and organizes new information to share with others. This new learning shapes and is shaped by prior knowledge. Prior knowledge is thus shaped by the experiences and beliefs of the learner in addition to the place in which learner constructed this understanding. The literature on the constructivist model of learning along with the literature on teacher professional development and dialogue all suggests that classroom teachers, over time, construct knowledge about which instructional approaches produce the effects they want with their students.

While I call myself a constructivist I do recognize that there are many occasions in a regular teaching day that I would use technology as a stand and deliver tool. It is because of this complexity that I would call the instruction-construction continuum a field of play rather than a succession.

It is my desire to take much of this sort of historical knowledge with me in my interpretive inquiry on how teachers use technology in a 21st century classroom. The goal of this work is to come to a deeper understanding by accessing the experience of teachers. It is my hope that this understanding will provide valuable insight for those responsible for supporting the shifting of teacher practice. I recognize that this topic is temporal and that my task is interpretive but also my interpretation is connected to my own experience as a classroom teacher as I embark on the exploration of the life-world of teachers in the emergent 21st century classroom.

Literature for constructivist model in teacher professional learning:
Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Dexter, S., Anderson, R. E., & Becker, H. J. (1999). Teachers' views of computers as catalysts for changes in their teaching practice. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 31(3), 221-239.
Eisner, E. W. (2002). The kind of schools we need. Phi Delta Kappan 83(8): 576-583.
Fosnot, C. T. (1996). Constructivism, theory, perspectives, and practice. New York: Teachers College Press.
Fullan, M.G. (1992). Successful school improvement. Bristol, PA: Open University Press.
Fullan, M.G., & Steigelbauer, S. (1991). The new meaning of educational change. New York: Teachers College Press.
Hargreaves, A. (1994). Changing teachers, changing times. London: Cassell.

Literature for philosophy of technology:
Feenberg, A. (1999). Questioning technology. London ; New York, Routledge.
Feenberg, A. (2003). What is Philosophy of Technology? Retrieved February 18, 2009, from http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/feenberg/komaba.htm
Feenberg, A. (2008). From essentialism to constructivism: philosophy of technology at the crossroads. Retrieved Febrary 21, 2008, from http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/feenberg/talk4.html
Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology, and other essays. New York: Garland.
McLuhan, M. and Q. Fiore (1967). The medium is the massage. New York, Bantam Books.
Postman, N. (1992). Deus Machina. Technos Quarterly, 1(4).
Price, Y. (2008). In a mother's voice: on transformation and graduate education. Unpublished Thesis M Sc --University of Calgary 2008, University of Calgary Division of Applied Psychology, Calgary.
Seimans, G. (December 12, 2004). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

Literature on dialogue in professional development and Hermeneutics:
Freeman, M. (2006). Nurturing dialogic hermeneutics and the deliberative capacities of communities in focus groups. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(1), 81-95.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1999). Truth and method (2nd ed., J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall,Trans.). New York: Continuum. (Original work published 1975)
Hargreaves, A. (1994). Changing teachers, changing times. London: Cassell.
Jourard, S. M. (1978). Education as dialogue. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 18(1), 47.
Kalliola, S., Nakari, R., & Pesonen, I. (2006). Learning to Make Changes: Democratic Dialogue in Action. Journal of Workplace Learning, 18, 464-477.
Orland-Barak, Lily. (2008). Convergent, divergent and parallel dialogues: Knowledge construction in professional conversations. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 12(Feb 2006), 13-31.
Penlington, C. (2008). Dialogue as a catalyst for teacher change: A conceptual analysis. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24(5), 1304-1316.

The love of story

2009-08-21T11:19:00.001-06:00

As I have said before, I feel I carry with me as I walk in the world a backpack. Within it I pack a certain view of the world I find myself in. The fabric is weaved with both my own experience and the tradition of those who came before me. The contents contain the notion that our nature of reality is fluid and socially constructed.
I also carry with me the assumption that as people we are born into the world with a need to understand our place in it. As well, to truly understand this place, we must participate democratically with in it. As a researcher I believe that I will be the primary agent for data collection and its analysis, yet if I am to truly come to an understanding I must work in collaboration with my participants to construct the data I will use. I believe that technology lends it’s self to exploration and democracy but not unless they are first valued. But why is this? I think I sit in the world this way as a result to of the mixing of the ingredients I was born with and the experiences I traveled through. As I child in the 60’s I struggled to learn to read. My parents hired a tutor to help me cope in school. The Tutor introduced me to “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis (1950). I identified with Lucy she was about my age and no one seemed to believe in her. She was overlooked. (If you have not read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe it is time you did.) We can learn from Lucy that people are much more capable than what others may think at first glance. With courage we can tell our stories. She can also teach us that there is a power in community when we join together we may produce a power capable of actually moving mountains. I have since read the story many times and shared it with my children when they where young. It of course was different through adult eyes but I am still reminded to never go out my front door with out some sense of the mystery that awaits me with the possibilities of each step.
I have discovered the transformative power in telling and listening to each other’s stories. The power lies in the possibility of growth, for both the teller and the listener. School did not come easy to me but I believe my real education in life has had nothing to do with explanations of what I know or my marks on a test. It has been more about wanting to know and diving in to find out. When I learned to read it was a Dick and Jane world. As a young child I had no love of story. It was just something we had to learn to do in order to live in the world. That tutor that introduced me to “The Lion Witch and the Wardrobe” encouraged me to crawl inside a story. To see it, smell it, and touch my way through the pages. I will never forget the magic she revealed to me by reading, drawing and talking about each character. This struggle gave to me a gift. It is the gift of story. I believe this is why I feel a need to approach my research as a listener and interpreter of story.

What do you bring to the table?

2009-08-03T13:50:00.003-06:00

I was reminded today that we all have gifts to bring to the table. It does not matter what you bring, it is sufficient. It does not matter how much to take, what is on the table is sufficient. It also does not matter what you leave behind. What matters is that you are there. All is well... it is all good. There will be days when life's burdens will feel heavy and perhaps what you put on the table will be less than yesterday, we will adjust. The giving and the taking is a dance and often can be a joyful one. What matters is that we talk and listen to each other and that we live well together.
Happy Holiday.

A Problem Renewed

2009-07-26T13:12:00.003-06:00

Doc Talk part two

2009-07-23T19:43:00.004-06:00

The Definition:

“The study and ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using and managing appropriate technological processes and resources.” (AECT definition)

At first glance I found it somewhat difficult to align my study with the
definition because the language in this brief definition all seems rather dedicated to the value of efficiency and a scientific tradition. My worldview is one that has roots in the humanistic tradition that lives inside of a technological framework. I do not believe that cause and effect has a place in the complex study of human life. Frederick Edwords sums up humanism as, “a philosophy for those in love with life. Humanists take responsibility for their own lives and relish the adventure of being part of new discoveries, seeking new knowledge, exploring new options. Instead of finding solace in prefabricated answers to the great questions of life, Humanists enjoy the open-endedness of a quest and the freedom of discovery that this entails”(1989).
Upon deeper reflection however while reading within the text again I found something more in keeping with my philosophical perspective. The word facilitating is more about creating an environment that is suitable for exploration and the democratic use of technology not the control we once understood. I struggle with our societies desire to improve performance. My study will not measure performance. I do not believe that teaching in the 21st century is about performing better it is about living well with uncertainty. This new notion of knowledge is about going deeper and making more connections. The learning that will be revealed from my work is knowledge that is constructed and connected in the activity of shared understanding in listening to the stories of teachers.
So after all that I think my work will sit out on the edges of this framework and reside within the words study and reflective practice. “That is study refers to information gathering and analysis beyond the traditional conceptions of research”(2008, p. 1).

Edwords, Frederick. (1989). What is Humanism? Retrieved from http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/fred_edwords/humanism.html.

Januszewski, A., Molenda, M., & Association for Educational Communications and Technology. (2008). Educational technology : a definition with commentary. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

The Time that is Given

2009-07-23T10:22:00.005-06:00

I took some time this morning to go through all of my delicious bookmarks in order to sort and sift to find links for my pathfinder. What a wonderful experience. In our busy lives we do not often take the time to look through our closets to find old treasures and useless junk. I have come to a point in my life where I am reflecting on the journey so far. As Gandalf said "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." The time that is given to us is indeed limited. As humans we seem to forget this until something comes to remind us.
Often it is a little reminder and sometimes it is a big smack.

The journey through the bookmarks was a little one... but there were other ones yesterday. My 90 year old neighbours moved out of their house to spend the rest of what has been given to them in assisted living . I hope to get to that place also one day but when I do I really want to reflect and look back with a twinkle in my eye and remember a life well lived connected by many.

Pathfinder - The begining

2009-07-22T09:54:00.003-06:00

I have begun to work on my pathfinder. I know that we have the date of July 31st for a peer review but I thought it might be helpful if we all kept each other informed in the different ways we may want to shape this work.
For my masters work I used dreamweaver and webdisk space provided by the university to create an e-portfolio. I had a page or more for each class I took. I found this very helpful when it came time for me to do my exit project and it served as a personal knowledge base. I think I want to do something similar here. The big difference now is interactive thinking. I now have this blog and the potential to include your voices on this journey.
For this activity I wish to mesh together constructive connectivism and use this blog and my stand alone webpage. I want to also weave into this tapestry my use of open source tools such as Youtube, Zotero reference management and delicious social bookmarking. All of these except Zotero will be connected to each other and be made public.
You can find this work in progress at my webpage https://webdisk.ucalgary.ca/~nmstuewe/public_html/DoctoralWork/index.html

dialogue with the problem statement

2009-07-19T12:14:00.002-06:00

After listening and reading the responses from my previous post this is my response:

Is the current effort to shift teacher practice in the 21st century informed by the realities of the life-world of teachers?

Reality
My own sense of reality I believe is called Metaphysical, because of this I would not think it appropriate to work from the traditional scientific method. I think that the way I sit in the world shapes the kinds of questions I put upon it. Like constructivists I believe we construct our own reality based on how we live, act and move in the world. However I also believe there is a reality that is unseen and unlived by me. I believe in more than I can see. Whether you call it God or not does not matter to me. My perspective stems from a Christian tradition. Reality is big and the world I live in has edges that I cannot get at. There is so much going on in our lives that we cannot attend to everything until something makes us look. So when I say that I want to awaken the reality of a teacher’s life-world, it means I want to help them see what they may or may not be paying attention to in their classrooms, and I believe this can be done through dialogue. I wish to engage in a conversation with teachers about how they see 21st Century learning happening in their classrooms. Perhaps through dialogue, we can then come to a share understanding of reality.
Dialogue
I believe I must also define what I mean by dialogue. My notion of dialogue is both hermeneutic and practical. Dialogue is something that happens when we share words. It is an event for understanding. It is a form of play. Bohm, Factor, and Garrett state, “Dialogue is concerned with providing a space within which such attention can be given. It allows a display of thought and meaning that makes possible a kind of collective proprioception or immediate mirroring back of both the content of thought and the less apparent, dynamic structures that govern it” (1991 ¶ 12).
Creating a Landscape
It is my thinking that I will approach the network of teachers that I currently know to see if anyone would be willing to dialogue with me over a school year at their convenience. I would also ask them if they knew of others. I wish to speak with teachers that feel they are giving 21st century learning a go. I do not feel I need test their practice with a criterion. It is enough for me that they see themselves as trying to teach this way. The knowledge gained from this is a ‘picture’ of knowledge. My point of viewing is not so much about the ‘picture’ that represents this phenomenon but also the philosophical frame I choose to place it in.

Bohm, D., Factor, D., & Garrett, P. (1991). Dialogue - a proposal. Retrieved August 4, 2006, from http://www.david-bohm.net/dialogue/dialogue_proposal.html

Problem Statement

2009-07-17T12:58:00.002-06:00

I'm so dizzy

2009-07-16T19:47:00.004-06:00

I was asked today to define Hermeneutic Phenomenology but not much came out of my mouth. There is much to consider before one begins such a thing. Like...where do you sit in the universe? Anyway here it goes, I'll do my best. As I know it in this moment of time, it is an extraordinary study of the ordinary from the inside. Which is partly why it is difficult to pin down. It is the study of things and happenings as they appear to us in our consciousness. We live in the world so it really is impossible to pretend we can remove ourselves from it to study something. I believe it is not really a method of generating knowledge but a way of thinking about knowledge. It is an art and a different way to classify meaning. It is often applied to the interpretation of human actions, utterances, products, and institutions. A hermeneutic interpretation requires the individual to understand and sympathize with another's point of view without ignoring your own.
A couple of key points:

The world is rich and complex with many causes and effects
Truth is a personal experience not universal
Knowledge does not have a subject-object relationship
Understanding and interpreting are essentially the same thing
Interpretation is a task
Language is the medium of all understanding
Language is not a tool but an activity between the speaker and the listener in order to play with understanding
Knowledge lives in the learner
Verification comes from dialogue not repetition
Dialogue leads to a shared understanding of personal experiences

So... a phenomenological inquiry may give me an opportunity to give voice to that which may not be easily heard over the sometimes overpowering drone of traditional research methods. Have we really listened to what teachers are saying is happening in their classrooms in the 21st Century?
Understanding comes by being in the world together. By creating forums in which people can join one another as co-participants to shape something new. It requires a connection in culture through language.
My experience with teachers is that they have such busy lives. If we are not careful we will reduce teaching to the 101 things I have to do every day to please all the people I really don’t like so much kind of job. Teachers do not need someone from outside telling them they have to change their practice, yet I do see a need for change. One day they may be trusted enough to be asked what they think and involve them in the process of change.

Taking a step outside your door...

2009-07-15T20:53:00.003-06:00

Those of you who know me know my connection to "Lord of the Rings". There is a line in the Fellowship that the character Bilbo Baggins says that I am often fond of saying. "It's a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no telling where you might be swept off to."
I think that is just what Bilbo was after...not the dangerous business but the adventure of what you could not see from the couch.
So I wonder is that what draws us to research, the adventure part not the danger. I think it could be exciting ending up where I did not intend to be.

The First Day of School

2009-07-14T08:52:00.006-06:00

Today was my first day of school. Well not the first First day that was a while ago, but a first none the less. Today I began my doctoral seminar for ed Tech at UofC. This is the beginning of the end for me. I can now change my profile from a first year doctoral student to a second year. It is the last class I take before I get all my...stuff together before I approach candidacy. The first day of school and I got to bring all the colours in my crayon box to use and a whole new lot of brilliant people to play with. I am thrilled! I have gotten over the scared silly part (for the most part). In this class I get to design my own path.
I have been asked to think about a definition for an Educational Technologist. For me it is all about learning and living in a connected world. In order to do this well I will need to be good at a few things like; taking charge of my own learning(personalized learning), develop good friendships that will support this learning (Quality Networks), find ways to organize what I learn so that I and my friends can find it again(Structure), and find ways make all this fun. It just has to be fun.
What I keep in my mind all the time is that knowledge does not stand still. At one point in my recent reading I came across the term "living knowledge". For me that means a playful approach to learning. But please do not confuse play with a childish activity, I am very serious with the notion of play. It is this understanding that shapes the kind of questions I ask and the place where I look for answers.

I want to go to "Tinkering School"

2009-07-08T09:29:00.005-06:00

Watch this and imagine. What if schools were really interested in need driven learning and not higher test scores. This kind of learning is deep and wide. The school focused on "doing better" is only interested in being right or wrong. Pleasing the people above and controlling those below. That seems more long and thin thinking to me. We hear a lot of talk from the people in control of education about "personalized learning" but everyone is so afraid to be wrong and make a mistake, perhaps look weak. Nothing personal is able to emerge in this environment.

I am thinking that what may be at the heart of this is the modern notion of technocracy and efficiency. In schools we still suffer from one way communication, from this only silence is able to grow. We do however see an interesting shift developing as more teachers are engaging in dialogue outside of their blocked school rooms. One example is classroom 2.0 . More voices connected to each other grows a harmony of voices. No one is as smart as everyone. This sort of communication becomes collective action within a technical sphere. Andrew Feenberg calls it democratic rationality(p. 108). We are gradually tinkering with the communication system and that challenges the power structure rooted in this notion of being efficient and a universal truth that is tied to subjugated knowledge.

It is difficult to keep this simple but I will try. I now have a new notion of truth and with that a new notion of knowledge. My notion is nebulous like the universe, not thin like a ladder. I want to go to Tinkering school because only when I am in charge and struggle with what I need to know when I need to know it will I learn what I need to learn. Technology is not the servant of my seeking it is the place I play in.

Technology and Democracy

2009-07-04T10:58:00.010-06:00

I have made it known that I have an emerging understanding of philosophy, because of this I have been unhurriedly reading through Gadamer’s “Truth and Method” as well as Andrew Feenberg’s “Questioning Technology”. I have found myself taking many side trips in order to give myself a more knowledgeable position to take all of this in. One thing I do understand well now is that we live in the world not as independently as we might think. The voices of those who came before us hum quietly almost unheard to many. We call this tradition and if we are not mindful we are in danger of just singing the same song through time with no thought of the consequence. Feenberg points out a rather pessimistic tradition of technology (p. 75). The thinking that humans have simply become cogs in their own machinery. He highlights for me the term, Technocracy. A social system viewing technology as a neutral instrument outside of our control, leaving no room for democracy or social interaction.
I have recently spent time exploring the 20th century’s use of technology as a read only culture in the early days of my blogging (mind map ). Yes it is complicated as you can see.

Feenberg brings to light Max Weber and the theory of rationalization, a process whereby social actions and interactions became concerned with efficiency and how it can be measured quantifiably rather than how effects us as people or how we feel about it emotionally. It seems to me that in the modern world of the 20th century people with this thinking lost the connection we had to each other as humans. Gadamer also reminds us that as humans we need to find gaps in our speaking in order to listen to each other. I have spent time thinking about this last fall. You can find this work on my webpage. For me that is the notion of a read-write culture, a culture in dialogue with each other. As Feenberg puts it we need to replace this notion with a, “Democratic” rationalization. In the read only culture that Max Weber was describing we put our faith in progress. Technology is only considered social through the purpose is serves and this would depend on ones personal perception of the purpose. This deterministic view holds that if need be we adjust ourselves to the structure of technology not the other way around (p. 77). Ouch I feel the pinch!

Constructivism argues a different point. We have a choice here; we can look differently at efficiency. When we look at the toys that technology has provided for us rather than saying how can I adapt to this toy and make it work for me? Another way is to look upon this more democratically as a choice between alternatives. To look for a fit between devices and the personal interests and needs a user may have and we as users do definitely shape the design process (p.79). Look at the “I’m a Mac”, “I’m a PC” thing. Cute advertising yes but it demonstrates this point. Two different devices with different design histories shaped by different needs. Good designers respond the feedback of the users. Feenberg tells us that technological determinism ignores this social complexity by focusing in on a cross-section of objects in our life. Gadamer may say this sort of clarity is not enough for living knowledge.
This sort of view has led us to look at dilemmas in a rather simplistic dualistic manner in the form of trade offs. It’s the red vs. blue situation. If we have more of red then we have less of blue.

One altered notion is Connectivism. George Siemens describes it as: "the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing" In our connected world we now have opportunities to think in a more nebulous way.
Feenberg’s writing fills me with hope. He suggests that technology can be more than a means to an end; we can look upon it as a variety of possibilities linked together. We do have choices.

Endings make new beginnings

2009-07-03T07:44:00.006-06:00

So I find myself on another edge. My job of Learning Leader for the Calgary Board of Education has come to an end. I was surplussed. It makes me sad. My job was going to schools and working with elementary school teachers in their classrooms on projects that involved technology. It was called the 21st Century Learning Project. Most teachers did not think they needed to shift the way they work...but some where so keen and eager, that is what made the job fun. Those of you that know me know that fun is the name of the game. Any way the job is over and it is just too soon. All I did was get into a few classrooms and show a few teachers a few little tricks. I did not get to explain the whole deep and wide of connected learning and how to create learning environments that are flexible for more ways to learn. That would take more time and more trust. I could go on but I can not see the point with the sky being so beautiful this morning and the air so fresh and clean (I'm in the mountains). The point is I feel a sense of loss with work undone. I also feel a betrayal of sorts in that the work that I did do was not widely recognized. The only feedback I received was that "it is important to build effective communication patterns to support the building of strong relationships." Since the teachers I worked with only communicated supportive messages can I assume that I do not toot the horn loud enough? That I think would be true. I carry the shy gene but I also believe deeply in the notion of dialogue. I struggle with telling people what to do or think. Communication should be a lived experience.
So that is over now what will I do with this new opportunity that has been placed before me? I need to adjust my thinking, move on and accept my new position. They have placed me in a grade two classroom at a brand new school with all the new toys to play with. It should be fun. I do not doubt that I will have fun. I just am still struggling with this sense of loss and what was wrong with me attitude. I guess I just better get out and enjoy this day that has been given to me.

The Subjectivization of Beauty

2009-06-17T20:08:00.002-06:00

Gadamer tells the tale of how in the eighteenth century beauty both in nature and in art became a subject of scrutiny. To judge and reduce the essential being of artistic beauty to its substance, qualities, attributes, or how we relate to it as a community. We are not looking at art objectively as a something perceived and named as separate outside of the culture we live in. It is a shared understanding. He states that the validity of an aesthetic judgement cannot be derived and proved from a universal principle (p. 37). Yet we are talking about absorbing a particular way of understanding within the universal. Goodness where’s the fun in that? The real joy of experiencing art for me is being able to approach it with my own individual backpack of lived experience. A common sense yes, but very, very personal at the same time. The most powerful encounters with art for me have been both pure emotional and intellectual. Something pretty that has attracted my attention and something that makes me think. I do not think of these as to different kinds of art I just think of them as two different relationships with beauty. I recall sitting quietly in awe with a Leonardo da vinci painting in the National Gallery of London. I only had three days in London so I went everyday just to spend time with it. It was indeed beautiful but the complexity of its historical importance on us a civilization was also in my thinking.
Gadamer is revealing to me this account because we live in the world build of the wisdom of the past. I do not think it is really is helpful to think of beauty and art as either subjective or objective. I think that viewing the world with this paradoxical lens is limiting but we need to take from the past this historical knowledge and add layers of our own understanding to be wise in our own time.

An emerging question:

2009-06-14T11:17:00.000-06:00

There are many well-researched and recognized barriers for technology integration in any given classroom today. Recently there has been an effort to diminish some of these barriers. Given my comfort and experience with technology as a teacher and learning leader I have a particular perspective and interest in this. So my foundational and ongoing emergent research question that guides this interest is,

What may be learned and then understood when teachers in technology rich classrooms are brought together within a hermeneutic dialogue to converse about how and why they use inquiry and integrate technology to support curriculum, learning and teaching in their classrooms?

A collection of other questions:
• What can we learn from classroom teachers as they integrate technology in the emergent 21st century classroom today?
• What stories can be shared and is there a potential for transformation learning?
• What is happening in a technology rich classroom environment that focuses on a playful notion of Inquiry and need based learning?
• What happens when we think of technology less like a tool and more of a place for exploration?
• What is it that these teachers feel they need in order to meet the diverse needs of their students today?
• How and where do they find the support they need to bring to their students this new technology?
• What frustrations do they have?

The Shift from the Renaissance through the Age of Enlightenment into a Modern world

2009-06-10T19:23:00.002-06:00

I gather that during the Renaissance my life would be centred around pleasing God and following a path that I had no choice to follow. I am pleased that I find myself capable and encouraged to think about these things given, that I am a woman and during this time on Earth I would not. (Kant has and interesting view of how women think.) I am to understand that the Renaissance provided the seeds that the modern world has been reseed with. It was in this period that humankind was promoted to the centre of the universe. It took much longer however for the notion of self-governing autonomy to take root. During this time the scientific method was developing but without any concept of pursuit of knowledge. The authority of the church lost some of its bite but the idea of the authority of reason had not yet replaced it.
Fast forward to about 1650 when reason and the ability to think would begin to find its voice in the world in the age of Enlightenment. Imagine a time when humans felt they had no freedom to think or act independently. The ability to think logically began to be thought of as a basis for knowledge. Today given that so few of us take the time to vote I think we have taken for granted this delicious notion to be able to critically think. I mean it’s a gift really when you look at this historically.
I began this investigation because Gadamer keeps talking about Kant as if he was a super hero and I did not have a clue why. Now I begin to see why. While I have major issues with the way so many people are caught up in paradoxical understanding of the world they live it, I do believe this scientific vision was necessary in order to gain freedom from dogma and disrupt the churches control on how we thought of knowledge and how we went about getting more and passing it around to others. But it is the 21st century -people lets move on. The world is wonderfully complex why pretend it is simple? I am convinced we need to get knowledge out of our heads and connect it to where and how we live in the world, the more connections the better. I am very grateful for those that gave to us the idea of freedom to independently thinking inside and outside our heads but the biggest set back in actually getting people to critically think with enlightenment is this peculiar objective view of a wrong and right way of living in the world. Teachers would best support their students learning if they recognized this and stopped preparing their students to live in a wrong/right world and started to prepare them to actually think critically and participate in a nebulous world.

Gadamer’s take on Judgement

2009-06-06T17:38:00.001-06:00

So I guess I am a humanist. I mean I do believe in the unseen. I come from a Christian tradition but what I carry with me is a deep belief in the dignity and worth of all people and that we as people are autonomous. We need to be able to judge what is right and wrong without fear from that unseen. I am concerned with a common good and living well with the rest of humanity. I gather that good sense and common understanding must have some connection to the universal. Together we come to agreement in order to live well. Whether subjective or objective we bring with us a view, a place to stand from in order to judge. Gadamer tells me that the word “judgement” was introduced in the eighteenth century (p. 27 yes I am only on page 27). It was considered to be a basic intellectual virtue or a way to behave. Judgement can be seen as ability; in this case it requires a principle to guide its application. Can we teach judgement? Is it a skill that we practice? I am not sure.
I am wondering how Sensus communis or this sense in community impacts the research that I wish to be involved in. I believe it imperative that if I want to learn something new I be able to unfasten myself from subjective judgement and allow myself to take up the perspective others may have. Yet I think that is not the simplest of tasks.

June 4th

2009-06-04T20:37:00.002-06:00

Even after 20 years this continues to make me stand still.

Hope for the future

2009-05-26T20:15:00.003-06:00

The Nature of Knowledge and the Philosophy of Technology

The post this week is a reflection of chapter one in 'Questioning Technology' by Andrew Feenberg. However it is deeply interwoven with the thoughts of Gadamer and my emerging notions of epistemological and ontological understanding. There is no running away from Gadamer now and there is no running away from my questions on teaching and learning. What is learning for? What is schooling for? Why do we teach? What is this nature of knowledge if we place it within a technological framework? When I say learning I mean purpose driven learning not memorization.
In this chapter Feenberg is really just sketching the main themes he intends to address in the book as a whole. However the chapter gradually brings in to focus in my mind that which was very much outside of my awareness just a short 7 months ago. I say gradually because nothing is sharply focused yet. Not long ago I remember saying out loud 'Technology has a philosophy?' Well doesn't everything that becomes real to you? So here I will attempt to lay this out on the floor to tip toe around for a minute:

I believe that philosophy is the study of the nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. What I call knowledge, reality and existence may not be what others call it.

With regards to epistemology and the nature of knowledge traditionally it has been thought of as the theory of knowledge associated with scientific-technological knowledge with regard to methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology can be thought of as an investigation that will distinguish a difference between justified belief and opinion. In this case reality leads to a single truth that maybe repeatable in order to be believed by others. For me this nature of knowledge just does not transfer to well from the lab to the complex world that I teach in. I can see how this approach works with memorization but not with the nebulous nature of purpose driven learning in the digital world?

However I have begun to understand ontology in a metaphysical way as a study of reality. My personal ontological view seems to be in line with philosophical hermeneutics as I understand it. I believe that understanding and what we believe to be reality is based on how we live and play in the world and therefore is in constant flux leading to more than one truth. So in my mind reality is a personal experience that we are capable of sharing through dialogue and language. So I wonder given this, are epistemology and ontology a dichotomy or just different windows to look through?

Historically we humans have not placed to much value in thinking about the technical. Feenberg reports that this goes back to the ancient Greeks who place a higher value on activity of the mind such as social, political and theoretical rather than activities of the hands. A view that I shared not long ago was treating technology as a neutral instrument and therefore did not require any kind of philosophical explanation or justification of its existence. In more recent times however we have a new notion of technology that is rooted in the idea of progress, freedom and happiness. Out of these two traditions form what Feenberg calls technological determinism. Technology's advance is the advance of the human species (p.2).

In opposition to this there is a tradition of protest against mechanization the most famous example is the luddites in the early nineteenth century. Feenberg refers to this as a substantive theory of technology. In this case technology may be viewed as an instrument but it is not neutral or free from values. In this case technological development transforms what it is to be human. This autonomous thinking naturally leads to fear of loss of control.
I am left to wonder what the thinking of knowledge is within a substantive or a determinist theory if technology is viewed as a tool. In fact Feenberg states that modernity is an epistemological event in which the essence of technology lives. Our drive for efficiency is linked to a rational method and a epistemological theory of understanding, as I quoted last week “Reason can be used to tear apart bad arguments and it can be used to apply universal principles to particular cases. But reason as an instrument of analysis on its own is uncreative. It is not an instrument of creativity or discovery. Reason can apply universal principles but it cannot discover them”(p.1)

Both determinism and substantivism view technology as an autonomous tool but what about those that see technology as humanly controllable? Feenberg briefly describes two other theories, instrumentalism and critical theory. I think it is on this side I think I place my hope for the future. It is on this side we find democratic control over the direction and definition of what progress is and intervention into technical affairs. It is also where we find social constructivism that lead to choices of alternative means-ends systems. I look forward to part two of his book that goes deeper into these theories.

Everything is amazing and no one is happy

2009-05-24T17:18:00.001-06:00

Thinking in Mind: Thoughts on Gadamer

2009-05-22T16:09:00.002-06:00

Neil Stephenson's thoughts from the Gadamer Reader
Thinking in Mind: Thoughts on Gadamer

Sensus Communis

2009-05-18T17:34:00.003-06:00

Gadamer Sensus Communis pages 17-27 Truth and Method

Within the humanistic tradition what is to be learned from what we call knowledge, truth and understanding?

Sensus communis is yet another term I had never encountered before. In checking other sources I uncovered that Sensus Communis in rhetoric can be used to mean a whole set of unstated assumptions, prejudices, and values that an orator can take for granted when addressing an audience. 1 The term has been identified with the thought of a 'sense' we have in common or rather something we all have.

A philosopher that spoke of this sense was Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Vico or Vigo (23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist.
Gadamer says that Vico's ideas are based on old truths (p. 17). Vico's ideas are built upon the ideal of eloquentia within a classical concept of wisdom. Eloquentia is rhetoric or saying something well, not just the art of speaking but also speaking a truth that is understood by others. However while he criticizes Vico, he reminds us that we go nowhere without the wisdom of the past.

Sensus communis can also be thought of as a basic human truth that is rooted in a common way of being. I wonder does that make it a universal truth? And what happens when the way we live in the world changes? I think at this point of my understanding I believe that Gadamer wants us to build on historical thinking but to move away from a truth that is singular and towards truth that brings many possibilities.

Shaftesbury in the eighteenth century described sensus communis as a restrained, customary, and regular way of thinking. It was not a capacity given to all. Gadamer tells us Shaftesbury viewed this to be a social virtue that is tied to the moral. He says that Shaftesbury's notion of a common sense had lost it's political connection and was associated more with theoretical judgement. Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (May 2, 1702 - February 10, 1782) 2, was a German theosopher that combined this humanistic, political view with the peripatetic(Aristotle). I do not at this point understand what is Aristotle's doctrine of nous. For Oetinger this is the divine mystery of life. He believed that even if one commits an extreme sin one could find their way back to God through the grace of God. These practices exposed him to the attacks of persons who misunderstood him. He is associated with Pietism in the eighteenth century which relied on this notion of restraint and added a layer of living knowledge.

I am drawn towards this notion of living knowledge I also see that there is a constant need to renew adaptations in new situations. It seems reasonable that understandings should rely on a generative rather than demonstrative method.

To summarize I think today generally when we use the term common sense we are referring to more of a practical knowledge and not so much this living knowledge. I had not thought of this expressions diverse history before now. My thinking is that in the 21st century it would serve us better to think of this sense in more of a theoretical fashion given that we now view knowledge as vast and varied. How could a singular or a universal truth help us navigate this complexity? So knowledge in this communal sense can't be a truth that is singular. Gadamer speaks of the old Aristotelian distinction or perhaps the duality between practical (phronesis) and theoretical knowledge. The practical being knowledge that follows a rational method and is directed towards a concrete situation it must 'grasp the circumstance'. “The sensus communis is created not by logic but by original, archaic human speech which bursts forth from the human condition itself.”A rational method analyzes the case, this means to break it apart or break it down. The Verene philosophy suggests that “Reason can be used to tear apart bad arguments and it can be used to apply universal principles to particular cases. But reason as an instrument of analysis on its own is uncreative. It is not an instrument of creativity or discovery. Reason can apply universal principles but it cannot discover them”(p.1) 3 . I hear teachers talking about this sort of thing often. They say, “how can I use this tomorrow in my classroom?”. I question how this practical knowledge can even in variety be of use if it is directed towards one circumstance? Students today live and learn in a nebulous networked world full of ambiguity. How is it that we want to measure understanding and truth in such a flat way? How does this thinking help us adapt to new situations?

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensus_communis
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Christoph_Oetinger
3. Donald Phillip Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1981) Taken from Philosophy and Culture Essays in Honor of Donald Phillip Verene -Glenn Alexander Magee, Editor : http://www.pdcnet.org/publindex.html

Making sense of Questioning Technology

2009-05-13T20:11:00.006-06:00

Making sense of Questioning Technology
by Andrew Feenberg
1999

This book is an introduction to the philosophy of technology. While I am a novice student of philosophy I was asked to think about this in the fall of 2008 and in response I co-created a Google Group with Barb Brown. I continue to have some struggles of my own as I adjust and navigate my way through this new territory. After looking at the topic with a rather wide lens I felt it was important for me to focus more deeply on what Andrew Feenberg had to say. He gives us a brief account of the growth of interest in technology. As a culture in the 20th century we became familiar with the notion of technology having an autonomous force separate from society. Two very separate camps began to form. Some took a rather pessimistic view and became concerned that technology seemed to have a life of it's own and would somehow run out of our control. I believe this notion lead people to write to stories of caution such as “2001 a Space Odyssey” and Martin Heidegger to write his essay on the question concerning technology. (I have read this essay but will write about it later.) While at the same time there was a push in our democratic society to expand our use of technology in our homes, schools and businesses. In both camps technology has been tied to the notion of progress.
Feenberg suggests that in the past our culture has looked upon the technical and the social as separate domains but that the fate of future democracy depends on us bridging the two. And that the fate of democracy is bound up with our understanding of technology. He feels that we need to challenge a essentialist philosophy of technology. The belief that technology has a set of characteristics that make what it is and reduces it to how it functions and its raw materials. This philosophy views technology as an instrument for efficiency.
I have just begun the first chapter entitled Technology, Philosophy, Politics. He begins by mapping out the territory of the philosophy of technology. Over time we have paid little attention to technology due largely to the technical being viewed as secondary to more intellectual pursues. In addition with the neutral notion of technology being an instrument society didn't really require and explanation or justification of it.
The other side of this map indicates the promise of technology. It is rooted in this idea of efficiency and carries with it a gift from the tradition of the scientific method. It is progressivism or rather technological determinism.
In opposition to this is a substance theory of technology, a protest against mechanization. In this view technology is not neutral and its spread is fearful. Potentially technological development transforms what it is to be human.
He mentions Langdon Winner and Carl Mitcham as further explanation of this thinking.

Background thinking of Gadamer

2009-05-09T10:32:00.011-06:00

It is early days as I begin to understand Gadamer. He uses a lot of terms that I am only now becoming familiar with one of them is Bildung. So I did a little searching to expand my understanding of it. This is what I found using the Literary Encyclopedia.1

The noun “Bildung” has several meanings, which is why the term Bildungsroman is often left untranslated.
By the mid-eighteenth century Bildung had assimilated the humanist-philosophical ideas of the Age of Enlightenment and become a secular term.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, influenced by a botanical and morphological framework from the natural sciences, achieved maybe the most refined and comprehensive definition of Bildung as a combination of Anbildung (acquisition of qualities or knowledge), Ausbildung (development of already existing qualities), Entfaltung (creative broadening of acquired skills or qualities without external restriction) and Assimilation. Goethe 2 defined his idea of Bildung with his own concepts of metamorphosis and morphology as a natural, organic process of maturation as well as a pedagogic principle leading to an overall harmonic wholeness.

So I gather what he means that it is a process but not a procedure or a behaviour. It is a growing or a creation. Gadamer seems to be placing it inside culture or historical tradition (cultivated consciousness). That's a bigger place. We can't forget the place we came from and the collection of voices from that place. Yet we bring with us our own sense of self -right? He calls it developing one's capacities or talents, a transition from becoming to being. The result is not a technical construction but a natural one rather, it grows out of being personally involved in your own life. We educate ourselves within culture (p. 10). It has an element of spirit but not an absolute spirit. A state of development not a means to an end (p.12). He seems to be looking at universality differently than what I understood it to mean. He says it gives us distance, it keeps us open to what is 'other'. To look at something the way an 'other' might (p.15). He does not mean that this can be measured by some fixed rule. We are just open the viewpoints of others.

A little about Gadamer:

It is said that a fusion of the Heideggerian notion of phronesis or “practical wisdom” with the Platonic insight into the dialogical nature of being that provides the basis for the development of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.

“All understanding is historically situated in a number of ways: for example, interpretations always come out of a way of life that shapes expectations; and interpretations are always configured in relation to some linguistic and conceptual schema; in addition, interpretation always arises in the form of specific hypotheses that relate to the particular events or beings to be understood. It is this situatedness to which Gadamer refers when he claims that any understanding is always already laden with pre-judgements. These pre-judgements are not theoretical positions, but un-reflective interests, orientations, and attitudes. Thus they are more being than being-conscious: “history does not belong to us; we belong to it [. . .]. The individual’s self-reflection is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life”.3

It is my desire to be reflective in my attitudes and my understanding of my place in the world.

Thoughts to remember from today:

the notion of truth as the event of disclosure, or un-concealment (aletheia)

What is fixed in writing has detached itself from the contingency of its origin

no interpretation can be definitive

finite play of disclosure and concealment does not prevent intelligibility; rather it is what allows interpretation in the first place

dialogue - if it is to be reasonable - must possess the attitude of hermeneutical openness to what is utterly foreign

It is only the transformative experience of the shattering of expectations that allows true insight

Gadamer teaches me that in order to judge an event I must take into account the accompanying circumstances (p.17). So I gather that if I am to understand why some teachers are successfully infusing technology into their practice I guess I need come to an understanding of that place.

1 Literary Encyclopedia http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=119
(Free to many universities)
2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) Playwright, Novelist, Poet.
Born 1749; died 1832. Active 1767-1832 in Germany, Continental Europe
3 Wood, Kelsey. "Hans-Georg Gadamer". The Literary Encyclopedia. 21 December 2003.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1663, accessed 9 May 2009.]

Think

2009-05-07T16:04:00.004-06:00

think

So I have been thinking... What kind of knowledge is it that understands that something is so because it understands that it has come about so? The road we travel in our understanding must be part of our understanding. No? How did we get here? Scotty did not beam us here. And why do we often discribe this knowledge in a negative way. I mean we often spend more time talking about what something is not than what it is. True we are in a different place with new understanding but why not include in the history of the journey there?

Introduction to Gadamer

2009-05-02T13:40:00.006-06:00

So there I was just a few moments ago sitting for the first time this spring in the warmth of my garden. Spring happens slowly in Calgary with many false starts and this year is no exception. There are a few green promises of growth but largely the ground in baron just waiting.
I have made a decision to read Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer. It's a tough one but there I was sitting in my garden with the promise of spring hoping for the promise of understanding.
So here it is. I just give it a go..
In the introduction Gadamer expresses that the problem of hermeneutics deals with the phenomenon of understanding. He says that the correct interpretation of what has been understood has little to do with methodology but everything to do with human experience in the world. It also is not concerned with amassing verified knowledge such as we find withing the scientific community. Legitimacy is found only in a deep investigation of the phenomenon of understanding. I have equated this kind of understanding to slow cooking on the back burner. It takes longer but it tastes better.
The introduction just seems to be setting the landscape for me. One thing I hope to gain is an understanding of what role tradition plays in my own understanding of my place in the world. What is this notion of tradition, the ghostly voices from our ancestors? I feel I must spend some time exploring my heritage as it relates to own understanding of self.
Part one deals with the question of truth as it emerges in the experience of art. I plan on reading that next week end.

The Nature of Knowledge

2009-04-19T14:56:00.007-06:00

Epistemology in the Garden
A New Nature of Knowledge

The following is a personal reflection on the nature of knowledge. Think of it as a metaphoric photo poem. Enjoy

Personal Professional Development

2009-04-03T11:28:00.004-06:00

As you walk through your professional life what strategies do you use to support yourself with wisdom?

If you go to this website you can view it with the audio.http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?presentation=217

Personal Professional Development

View more presentations from Stephen Downes.

Teaching and Learning

2009-04-02T15:01:00.000-06:00

So I have been thinking today rather deeply about teaching and learning. Or rather teaching is learning. I mean isn't it? For me they are so very intertwined I can't separate them. My job is teacher but I am a learner. I believe my role in this job is to demonstrate how the learning should happen or what it should look like. To be good at it I must open possibilities and pathways for those learning. I expect the learner to practice and think about what they are learning. I expect then to take what I share with them and remix it into their own life. I myself can not stop and take off my teacher hat when I need to learn because if I am to be a good teacher I must also be open to the possibilities and pathways that present themselves while I am teaching. Do we need a new word for the teacher/learner? How about the TLearcher?

Appraisal.Key

2009-03-17T14:20:00.002-06:00

This is a slide show of my presentation to 700 of my appraisal and proposal

Appraisal.Key

View more presentations from Nancy Stuewe.

Research Proposal

2009-03-14T14:29:00.001-06:00

The following is yet another step towards a doctoral dissertation in Educational Technology.

Teacher in the Crossroads
By Nancy Stuewe
March 14, 2009

I come to this work with the assumption we are born into the world with a need to understand our place in it. The nature of this understanding comes from participating in it democratically. Denzin & Lincoln (2008) note, “at the dawn of this new century we struggle to connect qualitative research to the hopes, needs, goals, and promises of a free democratic society” (p. 4). I believe some of this struggle is because we are at a crossroads of sorts in our culture. I also assume technology lends it’s self to exploration and democracy but not unless they are first valued, and not if it is used as a means to an end.

The purpose of this paper is to give me a direction in my research. Some of the questions that drive my curiosity are as follows: What is it like to be a teacher using an Inquiry approach today inside a technological framework? What is education for in the 21st Century? What do we need and expect of technology in the classroom? I wish to awaken an understanding by using reflexive, collaborative and participatory methods. I am not looking for universal truths. I want to think deeply about truth, knowledge and understanding in the digitally connected world. Why study teachers? Because they are me, they are the world, my life-world. So my question to guide this inquiry is, “how can a hermeneutic dialogue with teachers lead to a shared meaning making event and a greater understanding?" The focus of the dialogue will center around Inquiry in their classrooms and how technology supports this.

In order to do this I will first set the stage by exploring the essence of technology and the technological framework we currently find ourselves in. Secondly I will explore how a Hermeneutic dialogue in general will make it possible to release the teacher’s voice. Finally I will explore how and why this voice can be expressed and connected digitally. All of this is meant to be Interpretive in nature and to be an opening up of understanding. I will attempt to work with Gadamer’s metaphor of a fusion of horizons to possibility come to some shared ground (Price, 2008, p. 37). I will attempt to connect my interpretations of what I have read and heard from various sources. This is not meant to be a presentation of one understanding; it is only what I have uncovered as personal meaning while interacting with these sources. I have chosen to represent my understanding in a blog because this format allows for connectivity, interactivity and distributive knowledge that is not fixed so that I, and others may return to in the future. This seems only fitting because in Interpretive Inquiry we are to participate with our own understanding.

A Dialogue Begun - a creative process

I have noticed a crossroads, a cultural shift of direction. Marc Prensky refers to a shift between the Digital Immigrant, and the Digital Native. Others see a shift from web 1.0 to 2.0. Larry Lessig the creator of creative commons suggests we are shifting from a read-only to a read-write culture. He tells us that the 20th century was unique and that we are just now returning to a read-write culture. He has concerns for creativity in a consumer driven read only culture. He speaks about the democratization of culture in a read-write culture. Technology today gives people the potential to participate in a more creative, open sharing of ideas. Emails, Blogs, video, voice-mail messages expand our news and traffic reports.

While I have noticed a shift, I do not know what it means. How should it be interpreted?

I have an artist spirit and think of understanding as a creation of sorts. Stephen Downes describes:
"creativity may be thought of as the manipulation of one's experiences using the tools at one's disposal. The tools – whether computational, linguistic or logical – create a language, in which our experiences are the words, through which one expresses oneself, as a part of an ongoing conversation with those others who, in one way or another, express their perceptions of the world" (¶ 5 2007).

My dialogue begins with a creation of my own, a visual time line of the 20th century through to now. I created this time line with a tool called Cmap . I played with it in an attempt to make sense of a perceived shift. It was in this process of creation that the crossroads was first revealed to me.

A Timeline:

(click to view images larger)

Creating this Cmap was initially simply my attempt to track a time line of technology use through the 20th century. I wanted to get a clearer picture of what we have been using technology for, in order to help me unpack the philosophy of technology. It was simply a tool for self-examination. What I began to notice as I added more and more content over time to the map was that it isn't just our use of technology that is shifting. The shift appears to be wide spread. And I wonder is it more correct to call this a crossroads because the word shift suggests we are all moving in a new direction and I do not think the map indicates that. On the map we see in yellow a distinct read only, broadcast culture. Technology is used to project ideas, while in green we see something very different. The technology may have supported this crossroads. People now have an opportunity to participate in the creation and re-mixing of their culture. It appears that in a Web 2.0 environment the tools for creativity have now become more democratic. We now have more possibilities to participate and not have to actually be physically present. People from all over the world can still have a sense of Heidegger's notion of Dasein a "being-in-the-world" experience even though they are not physically there. Interacting with this Cmap has been a very interesting experience. I think of it as a unique dialogue in that I was both the writer and the reader. By engaging in this conversation I was able to make meaning of what I think is a very complex idea. It follows the philosophical hermeneutic emphasis that understanding takes place at the site of the encounter between the reader and the text.

I have also noticed a shift in teaching practice; some teachers encourage their students to make connections by engaging in the growing of their own understanding of the world. They think of their students as participants and want them to think there is more than one way to be right. They think cheating is not working together and data should be used for personal reflection and self-understanding. However when I was a student through the 60’s, knowledge was instructed from the front of the room. I was either wrong or I was right. Cheating was sharing ideas and data (tests) made me feel bad. I am aware that some teachers continue to teach in this way and that I believe is cause for concern.

The Place: A Technological Framework

When unpacking the philosophy of Technology, we may reveal a paradox or a “double edge sword”. It is common to hear people speak of warnings with technology while others speak of possibilities. Some might have certain assumptions regarding technology and view it as autonomous, not that the technology actually makes itself but that we do not have the freedom to decide how technology will develop. It is just beyond us. Others yet may assume technology is a human centred activity.

These two dualistic assumptions can get a little more complicated when we add values. One tradition we have is a legacy from the Greeks. It is the notion that there is harmony in nature and while this is a rather simple explanation it is a tradition that is value-laden. It contains the notion that the key to understanding reality is through our experience and action with it.
The other tradition is value free and has its origins from the enlightenment age . This view was a departure from the church being the authority. It led towards more freedom of thought for individuals. Scientific authority began to displace religious authority. It is a view that nature must be commanded and obeyed. Embedded within Enlightenment was the ideal of advancement and progress. Andrew Feenberg largely influences this thinking (2003) as well as Martin Heidegger (1977). I have created another Cmap in order to make meaning from what they said:

A Substantive view

With a substantive lens we may think of technology more in lines of a religion (Feenberg, 2003, p. 6). Using technology for a purpose would be a specific value choice in itself. Once we go down this path we will be transformed into a society dedicated to the values of efficiency and power. Neil Postman (1992) tells a tale of caution for those with this view. As a society he worries that we are more concerned with efficiency and are to the point that we are blindly devoted to technology. “Efficiency and interest is a technical answer—an answer about means, not ends—and it offers no pathway to a consideration of educational philosophy” (p .4). The means and the ends are all trapped together in this system. I do not believe my research will fit here.

Determinism

Another view might be that technology can extend our abilities and that we need to adapt to it, or get out of the way. You would see the need to be more efficient but feel helpless. In this case there is also a concern that a devotion to technology would blind us to what education is really for. When I hear teachers say.” I can’t keep up with the technology I believe they live here. They feel the need to master technology in order to live well in this world. My research does not live here.

Instrumentalism

Many of us today think technology is simply a useful yet neutral tool to satisfy our needs. We may think of it as the means towards an end. From the map you will be able to see that this comes from the tradition of Enlightenment. Yet even though it comes from a value free tradition it has embedded within it the notion that technology will make us more efficient and powerful. Still here is the pressure for teachers to master the technology. I was raised with the scientific method at the centre of my reality. Facts needed to be measured, proven and written down for all to read and verify. While cause may lead to effect with in a lab, this kind of thinking can be limiting when talking about knowledge and learning. Giddens (1985) writes that Habermas believed the study of human social life should not be studied as we study the natural sciences. Rather we should use self-reflection, and take some control to learn. “Because the analysis at that point becomes concerned with things that happen to the individual rather than things which the individual is able autonomously to control” (p. 126). My research will need to be a human centred activity and have the value of hope and harmony. I think if we stopped "preparing kids for …" and actually make their education meaningful and relevant right now, a by-product will be they will actually be better prepared for what ever may come their way. I believe education should prepare our students to be creative and connected in a world of ambiguity. It isn't about the technology really. It’s about learning to live well together within a technological framework.

Connectivism and Critical Theory

What hope do we have for our future? Feenberg suggests we step outside of this relationship with technology. We cannot understand technology by looking at how it functions. We perhaps need to think of technology not as a thing that we use but as a place. “That the real world of technology is a network, not a system, but a network that encompasses a system within it” (2008, p. 22). You might say that there is an essence of technology that must be understood in order to comprehend the technological world. A Social-Constructionist view might be that technology has no essence of its own. Feenberg (2003) informs us that Heidegger argues from a substantive perspective, although we may control the world through our technology, we do not control our own obsession with control. Feenberg uses Critical Theory to try to free us and take us outside of this double edge sword by taking the positives from both. He believes human beings need not wait for God to change their technological society into a better place to live. He believes we have a choice, and recognizes the consequences and freedom in technology (p.7).

I believe in the unseen. I believe that knowledge is not a something to look for - it is revealed by acting in and being connected with the world we live in. (Biesta & Burbules, 2003, p. 44) tells us that Dewey would say that knowledge is found in the happening of experience. It is this kind of thinking that allows us to think differently about cause and effect and the positivist school system. However I think even Dewey would agree in a digital world our understanding of knowledge must be expanded. I believe our understanding of the nature of knowledge must adjust because of how we live in the world has altered.

One altered notion is Connectivism. George Siemens describes it as: "the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing"(¶ 24 2004). It is here in this critical connected place that I want to explore with teachers.

The Plan: A Hermeneutic Dialogue – Making a Space for Understanding

I wish to arrive at an understanding dialogically “Engaging together in dialogue means thinking and reflecting on the daily events of our lives and experiences in the contexts of our shared social and moral traditions”(Freeman, 2006, p. 91). I wish to have my dialogue with teachers within a system that Feenberg describes - in a deliberate and democratic manner. In this case I wish to put my own understanding at risk to leave myself open to possibilities. The Sage Dictionary of Qualitative Research (2005, p. 70) describes dialogue as having several forms and functions. In each case the speaker would present an idea for others to understand. However I am more interested in dialogue that would lead to connected knowledge in a digital age, one that would lead to a shared understanding. The dictionary goes on further to say that the work of Gadamer (1900-2002) regarding dialogue considered it to be a particular way of life, a way of understanding our selves as beings in the world (p. 71). “In Gadamer’s hermeneutics, meaning occurs in the mediation of dialogue that occurs between the action to be understood and interpreter” (p. 186). Meaning is then grown out of the experience of talking together. “Language is not understood as an instrument or tool, but an activity that, like play, reflects an intentionality and allows for both the constitution of meaning and the instability of meaning”(p. 227).

Interactive Technology – a shifted lens

For my research I am thinking I will ask only a few teachers to participate. For me it isn’t about the many or finding a universal truth. I would like to open by interviewing each teacher face to face and capture the conversation digitally perhaps with video but more likely audio. I would like to be reflexive by sharing what each teacher thinks on the topic. In order to capture their expanded thoughts I would ask them to participate in a blog type conversation over a time period. Web 2.0 tools of technology provide opportunity for people to interact across space and time. My participants would not have the same degree of worry about ethics and anonymity because my participants would know each other. Yet it would still have the characteristics of openness, freedom and collective intelligence that is the highlight of the web 2.0 culture. If I am to explore democratic technology use with teachers it is important for me to do it with a democratic use of technology. I believe placing the conversation is this type of community would give it a transformational potential. At this point my method is purposely vague and ambiguous because I wish for my method to support my research as a lived experience. I do not want my research to rigidly support my method.

Concluding Thoughts of the day

The world is indeed rich and I do want to know more. The more I uncovered the more my imagination is fired and the more questions I have. There is however a few ideas I really want to underline as I move on the next stage of my doctoral work. The first is that I understand the importance of dialogue and the wee small place between the listener and the speaker. I wonder what it is like for teachers in this crossroads? What do they think? What stories might they tell? I had better be able to listen reflectively if I want to really understand. It is important for me that the work that I do be for teachers not about teachers. “Thus, the dialogues are the diamonds in the hermeneutic rough. They sparkle with interpretations and reflect the light of meaning. It is in their potential of ‘revealing’ that they are of interpretive value” (Price, 2008, p. 35).

The next is that knowledge is not something I gather or sow from just passively listening to teachers. It is something that will grow. It is a truth that is found in the happenings of my experience with them. There is a connection between knowledge and how I choose to participate. Finally there is no right or wrong here. I am not required to judge any cause or effect. I just need to describe for teachers living in a world of ambiguity.

References:

Biesta, J., & Burbules, N. (2003). Pragmatism and educational research. Toronto: Roman and Littlefield.

Denzin, N., & Lincoln, Y. (2005). The sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.): Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2008). Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.

Downes, S. (2007). Half an Hour: Creativity. Retrieved Feb. 18, 2009, from http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2007/08/creativity.html

Feenberg, A. (2003). What is Philosophy of Technology? Retrieved February 18, 2009, from http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/feenberg/komaba.htm

Feenberg, A. (2008). From essentialism to constructivism: philosophy of technology at the crossroads. Retrieved Febrary 21, 2008, from http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/feenberg/talk4.html

Freeman, M. (2006). Nurturing dialogic hermeneutics and the diliberative capacities of communities in focus groups. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(1), 81-95.
Giddens, A. (1985). The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences New York: Cambridge University Press.

Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology, and other essays. New York: Garland.

Postman, N. (1992). Deus Machina. Technos Quarterly, 1(4).

Price, Y. (2008). In a mother's voice : on transformation and graduate education. Unpublished Thesis M Sc --University of Calgary 2008, University of Calgary Division of Applied Psychology, Calgary.

Seimans, G. (December 12, 2004). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

Collecting Knowledge

2009-03-11T12:52:00.002-06:00

My first SlideShare Presentation:
Now I don't think you can collect knowledge like it is lying on the ground waiting for you to pick up. I mean what do you do with the stuff you know? So what you know stuff. Do something with it.

Collecting Knowledge

View more presentations from Nancy Stuewe.

Can we add to each other's understanding throught text?

2009-02-16T18:19:00.001-07:00

Traditional text in it ‘self is limited however that is when we think in linear terms. When text is digital it becomes flexible, movable and can be hyperlinked to tie ideas and places together. In an online environment we can use pictures symbols and colour to express complex ideas and emotions. It is also possible to add voice and video.
Here is a video that explains some of my thinking:

The Machine is Us/ing Us

The creator of this video has gone on to explore ethnography in the culture of YouTube. Here is a link to some of his work.
Michael Wesch: Toward an Ethnography of YouTube
http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2008/02/michael-wesch-toward-an-ethnography-of-youtube005.html

Truth and Authority

2009-02-04T17:56:00.001-07:00

Just what is truth and what is authority these days?

In a connected world we cannot claim to be the sole arbiters of truth or knowledge; there is no object truth because of the different places we all sit within the world. Reality is a very personal thing. Which makes me wonder what can we now call authority? Where does it live in a place like Wikipedia? As a researcher who is expecting to use the connected world to gain my understanding from, how do I know that I have the authority to draw my own conclusions? What if I disagree with my participants? Understanding is different than agreeing with, right? By understanding I mean being taken to a new place and leaving something behind. That is why the notion of dialogue feels comfortable to me. “Dialogue in this sense does not literally mean a conversation between two parties; in practice it often consists of multiple, even contradictory, voices.” (p.164) For me the dialogue in my research is likely to happen over time and be revisited by participants to see if they still think this way or to understand why they think that way.

With regard to an agreement about the validity in the observation of social phenomena in the natural setting I think the best we can hope for is a maybe. We are not talking about the positivist right-wrong world here. I also wonder what we can call a natural setting? However an ongoing dialogue over time could lead to some amazing understanding if we are open to possibilities. If this dialogue occurs within a network of knowing that is diverse. If the members actually participate, it is interactive and is open then the community could interpret truth.

With the adoption of visual methods and the nebulous nature of the Internet potentially there is a risk to the participants. In this situation if we have any hope of coming to anyone’s truth we need our participants to be good at describing the detail of the event. A relationship must be formed. They need to feel comfort to share and we need to look at the event from different directions. We also need to be there. I mean be in there not outside in the hall watching. Angrosino informs us on page 170 that this gives the participant a power that potentially might shape the research agenda. If this approach is taken then the need to protect from risk is reduced significantly.

An Artist's Spirit

2009-01-30T14:07:00.002-07:00

How can knowledge about a social phenomenon be best gained through interviews and if I express my knowledge through the arts how might this contribute to social knowledge of the phenomenon?

As researchers in the area of social phenomenon we are not trying to produce timeless truths. I have discovered that knowledge is a truth of my own personal reality. It is constructed by our own experience in the world. And not all experiences led to any great knowledge. So when we find ourselves aware of a phenomenon that attracts our attention we now are looking deeply at it. If what attracts our attention is also experienced by others, they may be able to tell us more about it from their truth or their reality based on their experiences. It is in language that we are able to express our experiences. We as the seeker of the story will have our own truth to work from and have unique collection of tools at our hands depending on where we stand in this world.

Now I think that most of us believe that the world is not flat but many teachers/researchers still collect data as if it were. If we change our visual image of the earth from being flat to the earth being a sphere in our minds our understanding about going deep changes it’s shape. earth hug With this image in mind the interview can’t be deep if the interviewer goes linear and stays flat with simple one-shot question and answers. When I read through the descriptions of each of the different kinds of interview types, I was informed that each of these is a method of collecting qualitative data. I myself could see me shifting in and out of each one of these varied methods. I think back to our first reading from page 5 of the concept of the researcher being a quilt maker. I truly believe for the interview to be a meaningful or valid method of collection, the researcher should be prepared to craft questions from all sorts of direction and deploy what ever strategy seems to be appropriate to the question at hand. If we just interview in a fashion of question and answer we end up with a very flat quilt with very little depth. If we take the notion of a dialogue approach and spend time visiting and revisiting the participant we end up with a thicker description and richer data. By dialogue I mean allowing space between the listener and the speaker. In this magical space is where understanding may occur. Since we are no longer working with the notion that the participant is faceless and that the researcher is invisible the dialogue approach would make a better fit for how I wish to approach my research.
I would like to try to apply my understanding on Arts Based Inquiry to my own research. I do happen to come to research with an artist’s spirit so I wonder what do I need to be mindful of because this is something I may very well do? I wonder how can the arts support the construction of new meaning? And when we say new meaning, whom do we mean? What about creating a space for this construction? I think it is more like fostering a community in order for participants to feel comfortable to dialogue with you and your research. How do we behave in this environment? What skills and strategies do we need? At this point I see three main ideas to contemplate. The first is the notion of community and the second how best to manage and participate within it and the third is to invite a broad range of perspectives into my community.

Shift??

2009-01-30T09:46:00.000-07:00

I think many of us have heard of the term Shift in education but is that the right word? Is it not more of a Rupture? What are we shifting from? What are we shifting towards? Or is it just a division of thinking that will never come together? I created a Cmap in order to organize my thinking on this and I placed a snap shot of it on my web page. It is huge have a look:
https://webdisk.ucalgary.ca/~nmstuewe/public_html/DoctoralWork/EdTechTimeline.html

Connected Knowledge

2009-01-26T15:54:00.002-07:00

Questions:
1. How can qualitative researchers participate in creating ‘public spaces in which marginalized people’s narratives can be heard even those who normally do not want to hear them’ ?
2. How can researcher’s authoritative voice contribute to social change?

I am not sure about the creation of public spaces as in the sense build it and they will come but there sure are enough spaces all ready present to allow for the qualitative researcher to fully participate in a global dialogue today. What we need to keep in our heads the notion of a lived experience and that we need to participate if we want the social change aspect. In this chapter Chase reminds us that the lived experience is and event that has potential to be transformative in nature if we are open to transacting with the data we gather. Not just in its collection but in the interpretation and expression of our understanding of it. If it is going to be transformative then it is not a one shot deal, it takes place over time. The tools we have available to us today as researchers allow us to participate in collaborative collection, interpretation and expression of ideas and these tools are expanding daily. Individuals now have to the opportunity to articulate individual ideas, remix, and co-create with others. In a Web 2.0 read-write environment the tools for creativity and communication have now become very democratic. We now have more possibilities to participate and not have to actually be physically present. The notion of fixed knowledge is extinct.
If you are like me you first experienced society and school in broadcast fashion. You sat and you listened, you thought and you sometimes communicated your thinking, end of story. However I have become aware of a shift in our culture, on the radio and TV we moving away from direct broadcast news and understandings to a more ‘participatory’ newscast. Technology today gives people the potential to participate in a more creative, open sharing of ideas. Emails, Blogs, homemade video, social networking, text messages and yes YouTube all give us an opportunity to participate in our news and even the traffic reports, why not in our research.

As humans we are capable of many complexities. Traditional text while informative is still very limited in the ability to make connections and articulate complex thoughts and emotions. In our readings this week we no double were involved in a dialogue of a kind with the text but when we viewed the video the elements of sound and images that are included in this medium expand the author’s ability to articulate complexities of emotion. Because of this I think we need to think differently about data and knowledge. We can now think of a digital camera whether video or still as a tool to capture some of this complex data.
What impact does this have on our understanding of knowledge? In this case this kind of knowledge is not a something to find. Dewey would say knowledge is found in the happening of experience. However I think even Dewey would agree that our understanding of knowledge in a digital world needs to expand because of how we experience the world has become more networked and nebulous. This gives today’s qualitative researcher a different authoritative voice (and face) because it speaks from the wisdom of crowds and it is this wisdom that may contribute to social change. It is the blending of these voices that gives the message a new connected authority.

Personally I am excited about this. The world is indeed rich and in the world of web 2.0 is just got richer. The power of we!

Picture of knowledge

2009-01-26T15:47:00.001-07:00

I believe the world is alive. It is constantly in motion. As Qualitative researchers we need to come to the table open to the possibility that we might learn something that may take us in a new direction as we explore. When studying anything such as a social phenomenon I believe it is important for us to not loose site of the fact that we live in the world. I believe we are connected to the phenomena just by being alive. If we want to capture any part of a truly lived experience we need to remind ourselves we do not live in a vacuum. How can we study the “other” as if it lived on Mars? We need to participate in the study. In this case we need to be prepared to dialogue with what we discover in order to use a wide range of interconnected interpretations. We do not need to concern ourselves with notions of timeless truths because truth is found in our own sense of reality through interpretation of it. “Objective reality can never be captured. We know a thing only through its representations”(p. 7). As Qualitative researchers we set about to study what is found in front of us and all around. We do not need to concern ourselves with the model of cause and effect, or right and wrong because we now know there are many ways to be right and there are many stories to be told. The often used language of “… investigate the causes of high drop out rates among ESL students ...), suggests that we are looking for a reason so that we can fix something that is perceived broken.

I believe the world has edges. I believe that there is more out there, things unseen, that there is mystery in the world and that we cannot prove everything. To investigate we need to have a spark, to take notice of a happening and then seek to understand it. The first step in any research is to notice something to causes us to care and then name it. To see that a situation requires inquiry is the first step in inquiry. The next is to take action to understand the phenomenon. Understanding depends on your time and place. This is a different way of understanding that takes us away from the traditional scientific approach.

We bring with us into research backpacks full of experiences. It is important for us to recognize what is contained within but as Qualitative interpreters we need not remove them at the door. He no doubt will come to his research with his own backpack of experiences. My advise to any researcher would depend on what is in his or her backpack and his or her philosophy of being in the world. Philosophy means to love knowledge. The search for this depends on the method of research. It is a kind of lens or his point of viewing. Perhaps it is a picture of knowledge. His point of viewing is not so much about the picture that represents the phenomenon but is the frame he may choose to put it in. Much thought must go into matching the frame to the picture.

Conversation Begun

2009-01-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

I have created this blog in an effort to be more interactive with my thoughts as I live my way through my doctorate in educational technology. Today I want to remember that I watched a video from Stephen Downes on Web 2.0 and Your Own Learning and Development. This is an attempt to take some of his advise and organize my knowledge in a more connected manner. http://www.downes.ca/