Re-entering the Fray

We haven't been to the beach as a family yet, as Audrey has not been able to travel much, but now that everything has settled, we were able to get away and spend the week in Cape May. As much as we all praise the ability to get away and recharge, I still have a little bit of Dan Meyer in me in that I sometimes feel that I could work around the clock. Maybe it's the changing definition of learning that has overtaken me, or that the way I approach learning is so powerfully informal. Regardless, coming back into this arena after taking several days away is intimidating on so many levels.

As this summer began, I had such high hopes for what would come at the start of this year. Now as the summer ends, I am seriously questioning what should be the top priority for me this year: increasing access for teachers in a non-threatening way, embedded technology in curriculum design, pushing through personal learning networks a la Karl Fisch, changing the way teachers approach their role in the classroom, or just trying to keep everyone in sync with all of the recent changes to our district network.

In the limited time that I have spent over the last day or so running through some posts from people like Jen Dorman, there is something to be said for a sequential process for either students or teachers to go through. This next week poses some really enormous challenges for me, both professional and personal, and one thing I want to hammer out before I begin the deluge that is the first week of school, are measurable progress indicators. I want to sit down at certain points, set up before the year begins, and assess what has gone on, and what needs to change. It is all too easy to get caught up in the small details of our work and suddenly find ourselves in December.

This is general and vague, but it is all I can muster after having been out of the loop for a week.

To Keen, Finally.

I've run into a logjam of literature lately. I had nearly plowed through A Whole New Mind, when the Brittannica Blog and several other places exploded with talk of Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur, and like Brian Crosby, the only high-touch concept that I was engaged in was littering the margins of Keen's book with my college-era red Uniball. Then, of course, Harry Potter was released and that is where I am now--knee deep in Hogwart's Hysteria.

Regardless, there have been so many things sitting in my Starred Items section of Reader, and I am just now starting to make headway through them. One I was slightly intimidated by, but I want to have a go at. Matthew Battles wrote in response to Michael Gorman's post about the need for their to be an editorial authority to purge the amateur from the production of media, a la Keen's premise. Battles likens Gorman and Keen's position to a replacement of traditional authority with a new cultural "police:"

does Gorman really believe, along with Andrew Keen, that “the most poorly educated and inarticulate among us” should not use the media to “express and realize themselves”? That they should keep quiet, learn their place, and bow to such bewigged and alienating confections as “authority” and “authenticity”? Authority, after all, flows ultimately from results, not from such hierophantic trappings as degrees, editorial mastheads, and neoclassical columns. And if the underprivileged (or under-titled) among us are supposed to keep quiet, who will enforce their silence—the government? Universities and foundations? Internet service providers and media conglomerates? Are these the authorities—or their avatars in the form of vetted, credentialed content—to whom it should be our privilege to defer?

I don't know that I go so far as Battles here, but nevertheless, I am a big supporter of content creation in just about any form. On that level, I am an even bigger supporter of personal discretion in what we choose to read and consume in the form of media. Most of the notes I wrote in Keen's pages are aimed at the educational community (duh!), because I truly believe that Keen has a point in taking the content to task, not the right to create it. What Keen is highlighting is the fact that the technology has far outpaced our ability to successfully guide our students through it's power to deliver a message.

The more people play with the content, and practice, and consume other people's content of higher quality, the better at producing it they will become. However, our role in public and private education is going to become one of increased literacy-based teaching. Content is now free, and freely produced--no one owns the facts. But the ability to decipher what is good and what is absolute rubbish will set our students apart as they enter the sea of information.

Photo credit: rustystanton at flickr

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