Data Visualization

I am not a numbers guy, not by any means. So much so that when someone asks a math question (even simple addition) in a meeting, I just look around the room and wait for the numbers to magically appear out of someone else's mouth. You can imagine my surprise then, when after reading Greg Farr's post on Leadertalk yesterday, I have been consumed with trying to get my district's data to play nicely within a widget-type application.

Patterns, I can recognize. Numbers mean nothing to me, and haven't since poaching tutoring sessions off of Raj back in calculus class in 1993. However, placed within a visual context, I can make sense of things and they begin to become real for me. For example, tell me a student is absent today and it means no more than any other day, but show me average student attendance plotted against some other variable, like night-time sporting events, and the numbers translate into habits.

Farr's idea of making public the school's essential data so that it is alive and "in your face" for lack of a better word, takes transparency to a whole new level. Instead of an intuition that teachers may have about the number of students in the hallways, real data tells them what the attendance numbers are, and better yet, if it is in the form of a widget that lives on their desktop, it is unavoidable. When data comes to you, it means something different than if you only go looking for it when you need it.

The second step of getting this data to the staff would be making it look all pretty and dance for them. Need twenty minutes of well-spent time? Watch this:







Gapminder is an unbelievable idea, and this truly makes patterns visible, and as Rosling says early on, fights misconception rather than ignorance. Right now, I am searching for some way, with my meager hack skills, to take our data from our SIS, and visually represent it for our staff (looking into using Many Eyes and Swivel). I love this idea, and I will settle for low-tech if I have to for now. Taking that representation to our desktops will be the final frontier. Imagine that, all of this from someone who ducks and covers when math is in the air.

Moral Obligation

In late March, Vicki Davis posted on whether or not it was school's responsibility to prepare the students for the outside world. Her post was in response to a quote found on Dangerously Irrelevant made by a school administrator which went something like this:

the school district is legally obligated to protect our students from the outside. It is not legally obligated to prepare them for the outside.

Her stance, one that showed moral obligation to prepare rather than legal obligation, was well echoed in the comments on both her post and on Scott's. And, in my opinion, it should have been. This idea that just because we block sites in school, and just because we don't use certain mediums within the classroom, that students will not have access to them and will inherently use them ethically is obscene. We need to create these "teachable moments" in a controlled and observed atmosphere, so that by example we can teach ethical internet conduct.

This is echoed from From Wes Fryer's post today: Free Speech on MySpace

By inviting students to create and share digital stories about Oklahoma
history with others in our state and around the world, we’re working to
help equip students with the skills they’ll need for the 21st century.
Digital learners don’t just need TECHNICAL skills, however, they also
need to develop (THROUGH PRACTICE, not just theoretical classroom
discussions) ethical decision making skills.

As we design our curriculum to include 2.0 technologies, especially those with collaborative, social, and synthesis-oriented aspects, we have to include some time for the demonstration and discussion of acceptable uses, as well as the implications for unacceptable uses. This case that Wes brings up here is one that would gain immediate traction in any high school American History, government or civics class because of its Constitutional and societal issues. However, when that curriculum was designed, was there ample time given to consideration of these type issues? Probably not. That does not preclude the discussion, but will there be time allotted for it? Going forward, the role of the technology integration specialist, or tech coordinator should increasingly be one of consultant in curriculum planning. Here is where a sizable chunk of the work needs to be done, and the classroom integration can occur with the proper discourse included.

The idea of preparing students for the outside world, for making them contributing members of this democracy, needs to be fleshed out in the philosophy of a district. Very basic questions like "What types of students do we want walking our halls today, tomorrow and in ten years?" do not have simple answers, but they are most definitely the right questions to be asking of your stakeholders.





Technorati Tags: freespeech, curriculum, web 2.0, technology, school

Progressivism, Again.

From the Joan Adler of the Green Acres School, via the Washington Post ("Teachers Can Spur Learning by Listening"):

Imagine a classroom where children are saying, "I have an idea! What
will happen if we try to run this motor with three solar panels instead
of just one?" rather than "Do we have to know this for the test?" or
"How am I doing?" In a progressive environment, children are listened
to, and their ideas are considered valuable and worthy of further
consideration or investigation.

A few years back, when I was finishing my master's, we were required to submit our mission statement as part of our teaching portfolio, and I remember mine having a lot to do with grounding my teaching in reality, where my students would leave with something useful, tangible and that made sense to them in their world while still taking a part of mine with them. By saying "my world" I meant the world of what I thought of as the world of knowledge--that which was contained in books.

Reading Adler's quote, it is easy to remember several times since the penning of that mission statement where I did not create that environment, and where that idea of validating student curiosity could have been subjugated by desire to give information. As a matter of fact, my first public school teaching job was partly a basic skills position where I was given six students and asked to do whatever I needed to to get them to pass the GEPA. After I finish here, I am going to dig up that portfolio and that mission statement and give it a good dusting off. What has changed about how I deliver information? I know one thing, it most likely will not exist solely on paper.

Would your fellow teachers or your staff have anything different to emote in their mission statements? How would you revise your mission statement if you were asked to do so?









Technorati Tags: adler, washingtonpost, progressivism, portfolio

My take on teaching technology applications.

Anyone for a think aloud? A lot of discussion, as much as I could glean from the limited access I have had over the last few weeks, has centered on the question that David Warlick originally asked:

“Are computer applications something that should be taught in a
class, or something that should be learned by the students, independent
of a class curriculum?“

This couldn't come at a more appropriate time for me because I recently began meeting with our computer applications teacher and with the curriculum director for our district There is a push to redesign the class from both sides. But where do we go? I responded on David's blog with the following:

Speaking from a personal standpoint, I would like to see a computer
applications class taught, but not from a Microsoft Office standpoint.
…Why not use the Comp Apps class to introduce the students to some of
the great data mashups out there, or some of the online office suites
that this generation might see in their work experiences? Instead of
doing away with it, we should use it as a vehicle for change, to teach
problem solving skills as they pertain to choosing the best application
for a specific endeavor. In this era of unknown problems and uncertain
solutions, demonstrating how to find the right app will be a useful
skill.

And this point was echoed on Chris Lehman's blog a few days later:

But I’ll take it one step further. We have to be careful about teaching
applications, because applications change. Let’s teach tech literacy,
and teach kids to do graphic manipulation where Photoshop is a tool,
not an end… we need to teach kids to use these tools, yes, but we need
to make sure the kids understand that the specific tool is merely a
means to an end, and merely one means to that end.

From my perspective, we look at this class as part of the business department, where the focus is on giving students the necessary skills to perform successfully in a business environment. For the last decade or so, the requisite skills barely deviated from the Microsoft Office suite. I can see this radically changing over the course of our students careers, from a desktop suite to an online, moveable, scaleable, and customizable platform in the form of OpenOffice, Zoho, Zimbra, or Coventi. In looking at these few examples over the last couple of days, what strikes me immediately is the Read/Write aspect of them that is missing currently from our Computer Applications curriculum.

My incomplete reading of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat has fortunately given me some insight into the nature of what we may see emerging as the future of work flow in the 21st Century: a project started in San Luis Obispo may be edited by a worker in San Antonio, signed off by a manager from his living room in San Sebastian and sent to printing in Macau. This idea is better stated by David Williamson Shaffer, via Padraig Nash at Epistemic Games

The United States is outsourcing standardized jobs, and will continue
to send them overseas until, in the very near future, the only good
jobs left will be for people who can do innovative and creative work.
Yet in the face of this dramatic economic change, our schools have been
spending more time on basic skills for standardized tests and less time
teaching children to solve challenging problems and think in innovative
ways.

What about giving the students the ability to see many applications then be given a problem, or series of problems and ask them to choose their application to solve the problem? At Science Leadership Academy, they attack the problem by coordinating their computer applications class with their subject area needs, so if the English department needs the students to know certain applications by a certain date, the computer applications teacher takes care of that. This could be my answer.

Lastly, I stumbled upon this "Unknown Quote" recently and I can't reconcile it. Does this fit our schools?

"School is the place where kids come to watch teachers work."

Not if I can help it.

Technorati Tags: education, curriculum, applications, SLA, warlick

I have some explaining to do..

In the same vein as Eric at Sicheii Yazhi, I feel the need to account for my lack of participation in the conversations lately. While I differ from him in my purposes for blogging, stepping away has done more for me than just give me a lengthy "to blog" about list.

My family grew recently, and my daughter Audrey is now a member of our wonderful world. She came a shade over three months sooner than we were expecting her, so we have been busy sharing time between our son, work, and the NICU. Needless to say, finding time to keep up with my reading and dialogueing has not been easy.

Hopefully, as things move forward, Audrey does her job of growing, and a better balance is achieved in our lives here, I can re-immerse myself to some degree in thinking and contributing to the discussion.

Thanks to all those who have accessed this space and continued some of the thoughts here. I do appreciate your time and efforts.

Here is a sneak peek at Audrey:

Collaborative Projects

VoiceThread

This link showed up on Clay's Daily Diigo snippets the other day and followed it, and I am thankful that I did. Regardless of its classroom applications, Voicethread is an invaluable resource. If you haven't been to their site and played around, here is a short preview of what you can create there:



The premise is fairly simple: upload images, record your voice as you narrate the story, or the story of that image. However, it gets even better when you share it with others because they can add their take on that image as well, and it all becomes part of the story. As soon as I began playing around, the possibilities became immense for me. Personally, I instantly started remembering pictures of events that took place in my childhood that my sisters and I have differing opinions on, thus completely different stories. This allows for multiple points of view on the same image. In that vein, pictures of conferences (there is a direct import from Flickr feature here) where discussions can be furthered using audio form and then posted for more collaboration long after the initial meeting.

If we want to take this into the classroom as a creative tool, or as an analytical tool, we can. Have students create stories with multiple points of view. Group storytelling takes on a whole new dimension here. Or, take picture of major current events story (I like what the folks at Daylife are doing with photojournalism), and have your students add their audio take to it. Shazam! Instant talking points for class discussion.

I love this stuff!