Digital Immigrants

Today, we had administrators from across the district in our training lab to learn about blogs, wikis and podcasting! I think they get it! What a great group!

At this year’s Texas Association of School Administrator’s Midwinter Conference in January one of the keynote speakers was Sir Ken Robinson, an excellent speaker on creativity and education.  He argues that creativity has its place in education and today’s society has replaced the need for creativity with the higher stakes of standardized testing in core content areas.  One of the more memorable topics he spoke of was how children  are inherently creative, and that creativity is “taught out of them” during their school years.  Here is an excerpt from an article on the London Business Forum’s web site (http://www.londonbusinessforum.com) that summarizes how creativity is lost in our children:

Thankfully, he said, creativity is not dead but merely latent, in most adults. In support of this view, he cited a book called Break Point And Beyond, by George Land and Beth Jarman. The book included the results of many tests for “divergent thinking,” which Robinson described as a “fundamental capacity you need to plot alternative courses and think alternative thoughts… to see lots of possible connections between different ideas, to see patterns, to see analogies, to think in metaphors, to see multiple answers to a question rather than just one.”  

For example, Land and Jarman sampled 1,500 children aged 3-5, and found that 98% ranked as “geniuses” in divergent thinking. But when they repeated the test for older age groups, they recorded very different results. Robinson called up a Powerpoint slide onto the screen behind him entitled “The Decline of Genius,” and on it were the following figures:

Age	% ranked as geniuses
3-5	98%
8-10	32%
13-15	10%

The clear implication here is that children become less creative as they grow older. And what coincides with this period of development, aside from hormonal changes and socialisation, is that they enter formal education. “They have learnt that there is one answer [to every question],” Robinson said, “and they have learnt: ‘Don’t look, because that’s cheating!’ and ‘Don’t copy from anybody else, because that’s cheating too!’ Even though outside schools we call this collaboration.”

Moreover, such habits of mind persist beyond school and college. In Land and Jarman’s control test of two-thousand adults (aged 25+), only 2% ranked as geniuses. “These are the people you’re hiring,” Robinson stressed. “We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, because of the ways in which we become institutionalised and socialised. Education is a big piece [of this], but work is an even bigger piece.”

 If you would like to hear Sir Ken Robinson, here is an excellent talk he gave to the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) forum.

Welcome to our Book Study on Will Richardson’s book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. You can learn more about Will Richardson on his blog: http://weblogg-ed.com/.

This book study will take a look at these tools and will provoke discussion about 21st Century Learning. this is a chance to partially immerse yourself in the life of today’s students. Maybe your elementary students are not fully aware of all these technologies, but they will be.

Here are some questions I would like to hear your thoughts on:

• Should we ignore the future they are guaranteed to live in or can we give them the foundation they need be successful, safe and happy?
• What duty do we have to prepare them for the world we know so little about?

We begin talking about Wikis in Chapter 4 of  Wil l Richardson’s book.  Here are some links to Wikis you might find interesting:

Wikipedia 
WikiRecipes
Wikitravel
Wiki in Education

As I was re-reading the first few chapters of Will Richardson’s book, I really started to wonder in what ways we are inadvertantly holding our students back.  My thoughts always go to technology, obviously.  I am often torn about the struggle we have with students trying to get to sites that are blocked by the content filter.  My torture comes from some of the things Mr. Richardson said in his book about whether we are teaching our students how to behave using these tools. 

We know they are out there, after school, somehow while at school, at the public library, on their phones, etc.  When we saw him speak last year he said something that has stayed with me.  Our students are in the wilderness.  Who is guiding them? 

I find myself stuck in the position of being a “big brother” and I am sure there are some that have better names for me than that.  It is not something I enjoy.  I often “see” what our students are doing or trying to do and it does look like they are in the wilderness.   So, what can I do?  What can we do?

I think talking about Will Richardson’s book and all the technologies he speaks of is where we begin.   What I gather from the book are these thoughts:  We need to be engaging students in these technologies in meaningful ways.  We need to start designing our learning activities to include these technologies that give them opportunities to fill their time with doing things that help them learn what we need them to learn.  Can we turn the time they spend on MySpace into time reflecting on their current literature topic?

I think there may be a time when we free up MySpace, YouTube, and all those other sites we currently deem distracting and disruptive.  I hope as we continue this conversation more of our students will be engaged in learning activities that will keep them engaged.

Here is a post on a blog called the 360 Degree Influence Blog called Getting in the Way of 21st Century Learning.  Take a look at it.  I can’t wait to hear your thoughts.