Post #8: Implications of The Information Diet, by C. Johnson: Where there's a will, there's a way.

      I found this book the most readable due to the author's writing in a kind of storytelling fashion.  Including a lot of recent historical facts about the machinations of media and the people that create it. It began with the author's awakening to the media machine in Washington, DC and his growing cynicism over the true purposes and effects of the use of media.  The last half of the book is suggesting a way to proportion your daily intake of information, both digital and hard copy.

What I see in my teaching is that the information that I provide to the students must battle with all of these other sources of information.  And it's a losing battle. There is no diet for teenagers, parents are mostly unaware of what their children are looking at on their phones all day.  When I walk down the halls of my school, students have their faces buried in their phones, they wouldn't notice a Leprechaun riding a unicorn go by.  To top it off, there is no way to enforce it, and that's when they are IN SCHOOL.  What happens when they get out?  Even more of the same, I'll wager.

In class, our group of Shawn, Muffin and myself came up with a device for students to manage their information diet called, "The PIE", for "Planned Information Expenditures".  It consisted of colored pieces of paper, cut into overlaying circles.  I cut slits into each circle so it could be visible from the top side and each color represented a part of the information diet: Red - POV/Diversity; Blue - Skill Development; Green - Local/Social; Yellow - Entertainment; and Purple - Shopping. You could change each layer's portion of the whole circle and the idea was to indicate consequences of too much of any one area.  The idea is that this disc could fit in a binder as a reminder to students during the day on how their information time should be allocated.  This could also be adapted to an app, but the enforcement and parent tie-in would have to be worked out to be effective. Whatever device is developed, students and parents must have the will to follow it, otherwise there's no way it's going to be worth anything.

Post #7: Students as Designers and the 6th Design Principle: "To cross the ocean, you have to be willing to lose sight of the shore."
The design principle of letting students be designers means breaking from the "usual method" of traditional lesson design and planning,\. That involved reading content guides, addressing standards, and learning the objectives so that you could develop your lesson plans in a formulaic manner.  In the "designer's method", the content, principles and "ends" lead to the "design".  From that an authentic problem is developed as a student goal. The teacher scaffolds the students, supplying them with what they need to know and do to be successful at addressing the authentic problem. Links to tools, activities and culture must be made to the authentic problem before the "planning" can begin.

At every teacher evaluation for the past 12 years administrators want to see how you organize your lessons, how the objectives are stated, and if they are aligned with state and county standards.  In recent times there is a concerted shift in that paradigm towards authentic lessons and I see where these design principles address that and more. We are doing PBL and OttW in baby steps but this is where they want us to go.  So much so that I feel that the old lessons are not going to be accepted in the future, even if they worked. I have two "beefs" with this trend besides the obvious one of that the old ones work, why get rid of them?  First, that this continues a never ending stream of new initiatives that are just window dressing for telling teachers how they should teach.  Second, that this is just making schools as the main technology marketplace for technology companies.  After we have adopted all the technology and 3 years has gone by, what is the update maintenance going to be for the hardware and software?

Part of me, getting cynical as I get older, also thinks that there are no longer administrators who can tell what an "effective" teacher looks like, so they need these tokens that they can check off a list and feel like they can tell.  I began with a navigational reference relating how we must let go of the "usual method" to adopt the "designers method." I will end with another one, "Captain, I don't think the matter-antimatter engines can take the strain much longer."

Post #6: Teachers as Designers and the 5th Design Principle: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
As I read articles such as "Professionalism and Teachers as Designers" by Calgren, I (1999) and "The Creative Spirit of Design" by McDonald, J.K. (2011) I find myself at odds with the authors as far as how their articles correspond to the old riddle.  To get good lessons you have to try them and go through an iterative improvement process. So which comes first, a good lesson or the design of a good lesson?  The crucial points of the articles are a bit cloudy in my head, but my take on the articles is the following.  First, that teachers need to change the way they prepare their lessons by "disembedding" their tacit knowledge acquired by acquaintance and let students, instead, go through that process.  Second, that the design process of the lesson must occur in some virtual practice, prior to use in the classroom (before action). Third, that a "creative spirit of design" approach provides more opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, multiple outcomes and an examination of assumptions in unconventional ways.  The 5th Design Principle discussed in class summarized this as "Good learning designs are anchored in the creative spirit of design by teachers who recognize their before action role as designers."

As stated above, I research what has been done already in developing lessons, I am a firm believer in not "reinventing the wheel", if the "Ends" are met.  I synthesize the research into my lesson and perform "affordance analysis" to match tools and symbols as appropriate.  I do play it through my mind before putting it into action, and I use my own creativity in boiling down a lot of words from many sources into the essential ideas of the lesson.  In my opinion and practice, you have to go through a process of trial and error, reflection and improvement each time you do the lesson.  I have been doing this for 13 years and it is still the same.  The other reality-based constraint I brought into our last class discussion on this topic is that time is a factor.  When I say that, I mean time is a multi-faceted factor.  You have a certain amount of time to get the "improved" lesson ready (virtually), and it must be delivered within a calendar time frame that is coordinated with curriculum guidelines.

It's great that Sweden 16 years ago started telling their teachers what they need to do in their time out of school, but I stated that (good) teachers already spend as much time on school work out of class as they do in class and I don't see this idea, as presented, too realistic where I sit.  I think it would take too much time out of what doesn't already exist, spare time for teachers to decompress.

Post #5: Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning: 

      In developing the 4th Design Principle (Knowledge) in class, the readings discuss how it's not just "What You Know", but also "Where" and "How" you learned it.  Specifically promoting activities that are situated in the culture that the learning activity and tools can be applied in.  This is demonstrated by the example of learning new words in the context of daily conversations versus by looking words up in a dictionary.  Enculturation involved the idea that tools "can only be fully understood through use, and using them entails both changing the user's view of the world and adopting the belief system of the culture". Cognitive apprenticeship supports learning in a domain by enabling students to acquire, develop, and use cognitive tools in authentic domain activity.

      I think it means that someone can own a tool and know its name, but they may not know the proper use of the tool as defined by the culture that they are working/living in.  Learning must include authentic activities that relate to that cultural purpose, and give the learner opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge in the real world.

     In my practice the physics lab activities that we do in each lesson all have an origin in authentic application. Projectile motion is the current lesson I am teaching and it can be related to ballistics analysis in military and forensic science professions.  Whenever possible, I use computer simulations to replicate authentic activities to make this apparent to the students.  For my labs, I always try to bring in authentic activities to the labs so that connections can be made to real-world activities and the students can pursue that further as their understanding and interests are developed.

Post #4: "Mind in Society" by Lev Vygotsky and the Third Design Principle

As a constructionist, Vygotsky believed that cognitive development depended upon the use of "tools", so associations could be made with its environment. Tools such as symbols and speech allow for socialization to do work and eventually internalize the symbols.  Once internalized, generative thought could morph them into a new tool to perform new kinds of work.  Through play, the conscious realization of the purpose of activities is realized.  At the end of development, rules emerge and create a relationship between situations of thought and their  real-life counterparts.

I had a very difficult time reading this book, especially the first half, but from our discussion in class I got some better understanding.  So higher psychological functions such as reflection, synthesis and application of new tools developed from internalization of previously learned symbols and tools. Symbols such as speech, graphics and numbers allow for socialization and assimilation into culture. By using a tool or symbol to do work, the mind realizes the usefulness of it and helps move activities from "what I'm ready to learn to do", across the "zone of proximal development" into activities that "can be done independently".  Speech is the main tool, I think Vygotsky is saying, that has the most bang for the buck in cognitive development because of the way it leads to socialization, internalization and new generative thought.    

For my classes, I'm using a new data analysis software tool to look at graphs of moving objects, which the students download for free onto their own laptops, so that they can do the analysis of the data graphs of the change in position, velocity and acceleration motion in one dimension on their own. When they look at each of the three graphs it helps associate each part of the motion with what is really happening. In studying motion, we also use "arrows" to symbolize the direction of the object's change in position, velocity and acceleration, and sometimes they don't point in the same directions.  Both of these tools help the students internalize the relationships of changes in position, velocity and acceleration. This internalization will then be synthesized in the next chapter when we study projectile motion, which is linear motion but in two dimensions.