Unplugged

How do keep students from turning us off as they arrive in school? If you have walked through an American high school recently, you have seen the clandestine use of mobile devices and you have probably seen your share of disaffected students. If you spoken in front of a group of them, chances are, unless you were 100% compelling, you saw at least one set of eyes roll in the ubiquitous sign of adolescent lassitude: "whatever."

I should rephrase that--that scene could have been any time within in the last twenty years, but after reading Roy Wenzl's article "Are We Losing our Boys?" from the Wichita Eagle, a confluence of recent ideas began to identify itself as a pattern within my head.

Thanks to Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant for pointing me towards this article in the first place, and his final thoughts on the post set off this chain for me:

As educators, we are in a battle for eyes, ears, and brainwaves. So far many of us are losing (and, as a result, so are our students).

This has been the trend for several years, and I can easily recall scores of conversations from either graduate school or in new-teacher meetings in districts I have worked in, where the complaint was that we were expected to "perform" in order to compete with everything grabbing the students attention. I may even have been guilty of uttering those words as well. The idea was that we had to sing and dance to keep the attention of the student. George Siemens points out that the idea of sitting through a lecture is not an evil one, and I think that in the whole scheme of a curriculum, it will always have a place. But if that is all you are offering, you have the wrong mindset, and I think that is obvious. That competition is long since over.

If it's a battleground we're looking for, Ron Matson, chairman of the department of sociology at Wichita State University, when speaking about reasons for the "checking out" of adolescent men, had this to offer:

"They are playing video games," he said. "Or withdrawing from society, and with computers and television, you can do a lot of withdrawing."I look at my kids and grandkids and think, holy smoke, what kind of world will they inherit?"

That's entirely up to us, isn't it? If we choose to persist with the lecture, the "drill and kill" so many of the students in Wenzl's article talked about as par for the course (and as so many students across the U.S. can attest to), and fail to use the same "distractive" technologies that Matson earmarks as contributors to student malaise, then, yes, our future is bleak. But what about flipping the script and using the mentality of the group over at Epistemic Games? The very same technologies that are forcing kids to power down when they enter school will be our avenue to power them up and keep them charged long enough to become the lifelong learners they will have to be.

Passion is the key to all of this. Will Richardson is noted for telling educators to jump into the read/write web by finding something they are passionate about and immersing yourself in the resources available through Web 2.0. Identifying those within students has long provided educators with portals into tough to reach students, and now is no different. Our passions will direct our learning, both teacher and student, in School 2.0 (and life, for that matter); rarely is a student, male or female, passionate about worksheets, lectures, or passive learning. Students today and tomorrow need to interact with, remix, and create content.

Trent Watta, one of the students profiled in the article, states:

"When you find something you're passionate about, it no longer becomes work. You don't even realize you're working."

And that's one to grow on.

Using Video Game Design Principles in the Classroom

Here is a great idea that the University of Chicago came up with at the North Kenwood Oakland Middle School along with the Center for Urban School Improvement's Digital Youth Program:

The challenge we chose to accept was to use video game design principles to design a course to develop students’ digital media skills, media critique skills and overall computer literacy. If successful teachers could effectively take advantage of the resources afforded by the school’s 1:1 computing environment. Our solution - a 90 minute weekly media arts class set up as a simulated record label taught by two members of the Digital Youth after school staff who are involved in the music industry. Each sixth grade class was given the goal of creating by the end of the school year; 2 recording groups, 7 songs, 2 music videos, a publicity campaign that included a 30 second radio promo, a website and a CD. The culminating activity for this Media Arts class is a record label launch party.(from Pinkard: Videogames Inspire a Different Design for Classroom Learning)

The prospect of asking large public schools to infuse technology into their curriculum is harrowing enough sometimes, and asking them to then use the model of a video game, long considered the arch-rival to academic rigor, is one I wasn't really able to visualize before I came across this article. I like the idea of creating a multi-layer project under the guise of a far-off product release or showcase. It's authentic to the students and according the article, fulfilling enough for them to use higher-level thinking skills to accomplish. Meanwhile, the students will never see it this way. Through their eyes, they are making something happen, making something appear alive where there was nothing in the beginning: it has value and meaning rather than second-hand obligation. It always reminds me of when I start saving money for something; as the amount in the bank grows, the momentum becomes palpable and you begin doing whatever you can to see it continue and increase. In the end, the correct environment was created.


I am curious as to what the discussions are like among group members in this project and how they have set it up; what was the bait? Thanks to Scott McLeod for turning me on to anti-teaching, and the merits it has in creating questions, rather than demanding answers. Mike Wesch, the author of Anti-Teaching, comes to the realization that the environment where learning takes place far outweighs the benefit of "good" teaching. He states:

Borrowing from Marshal McLuhan’s famous aphorism, “the medium is the message,” Postman and Weingartner argue that the environment (or “medium”) of learning is more important than the content (the “message”) and therefor teachers should begin paying more attention to the learning environment they help to create. The emphasis is on “managing” this environment rather than teaching per se.

The project created in the North Kenwood Oakland Middle School is a fantastic example of this. A non-traditional setting where the students determine the outcomes based on questions that they themselves generate. An environment where structures and scaffolding were not limiting, but rather acted much like a game situation; when one problem or question was satisfied, another level of questions presented itself. There's the connection then: let us design lessons not to replicate the pace, or even the technology of the video game, but rather its emphasis on challenging the learner with a series of tasks that engage them and move them along a semi-determined path.



If anyone has any similar lessons or designs like this, I would love to start moving toward this with my staff. I know there is a bridge to gap between where the students aptitudes and interests are (see "Manifesto"), but the difference does not have to be made up solely by technology. Mike Wesch does it with little technology, save the digital cameras for recording the outcome, with close to 400 students. This is possible.