Going One to One

My district is considering going one to one with laptops. That is exciting, but I am also concerned. I just read the newest blog post from the blog "Learning is Messy" and here is a quote from the comments:

"...most 1:1 programs I’ve seen have gone down in flames for the very reasons you state. Teachers are the key, and a willingness to do this differently."

Down in Flames!!! This is such a common story. Back when I was working in a computer lab in Missouri in around 1995 I remember hearing a similar story about computer labs. Schools would spent huge amounts of money on getting computer labs, but there was no plan for regular upgrades and after a few years the equipment was obsolete and there was no way that the school could afford to replace it. Also teachers hadn't been using it much and so there was no vision of the value it could have.

I hope our school district is thinking carefully about replacement and total cost of ownership and also about teacher involvement. This year we will have both a full time Instructional Technology Coach and a full time Instructional Coach for each building. That is an amazing commitment to teacher support and I think we have a chance of hanging in there.

Has anyone reading had this experience? Any advice?

Netflix and Collaboration

I just read a really interesting article in the New York Times about the power of collaboration. Netflix has been running a contest since 2006 to find a way to significantly improve the movie recommendation system. At the end of the contest (They had 30 days to try to beat the first team that reached 10% improvement.) there was "almost a race to agglomerate as many teams as possible" David Weiss, a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania is quoted as saying, "The surprise was that the collaborative approach works so well that trying all the algorithms, coding them up and putting them together far exceeded expectations." This is such a different approach than we have been using (knowing what another competitor is trying is cheating) It is so interesting to read this type of thing outside of K-12 Education. What would the world be like if we all collaborated?

Happenings in West Bank Village - At Tuwani

I am on an email list that gives me information about At-Tuwani, the village that I visited near Bethlehem. I was quite surprised to receive an email yesterday about an incident that occurred on the 3rd of July.

AT-TUWANI Release: Israeli Police, Accompanied by Israeli Settlers, Arrest_Palestinian:_Three Palestinians Arrested Within Eight Days for Grazing Sheep_3 July 2009__[Note: According to the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of_Justice in the Hague, and numerous United Nations resolutions, all Israeli_settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are illegal._Settlement outposts are considered illegal also under Israeli law.]__...

Short summary: Christian Peacemaker Teams have been asked to live in the village in order to be witnesses of what is happening. A shepherd was out in a field on Palestinian land with his sheep when his brother came to talk with him. Both of them were arrested and taken into jail for being on Israeli land. The land that they were on belongs to a Palestinian family, but the shepherds are powerless if settlers come with police to arrest them. They will probably be released, but the constant harassment is hard to bear.

Multitasking from Brain Rules

I am fascinated by the way the brain works and I have been interested for a while in the fact that some people say you can multitask and others say it is impossible. I think it is partly because I am married to a professor who spends lots of concentrated time thinking deeply about things and sits in “fascinating” lectures where NO one would consider having handouts or using PPT and often read from prepared papers.

As you might imagine he thinks that people cannot multitask and that students who do email and look at websites while listening to his lectures are tuning him out and not paying attention. He is better than friends of his who make everyone close their laptops during class and decry the existence of wireless in the classroom (“Why would you put wireless in a classroom? It is just a distraction!!”)

On the other side I have many friends in the Ed Tech community who say that one of the problems with education is that we don’t recognize that kids are changing and that they CAN multitask. Examples are given of kids doing homework while listening to music while carrying on a conversation online while playing an online game. So, can people multitask or not?

It is clear that there is a difference between generations. I wouldn’t even TRY what some of the kids do today. I KNOW that I would be totally mixed up.

Well… I just read a really interesting chapter in a book called “Brain Rules” by John Medina. He is a “developmental molecular biologist and research consultant” in Seattle, Washington. I highly recommend reading this book. Here is a small part of what he says about multitasking:

“Recently, I agreed to help the high-school son of a friend of mine with some homework, and I don’t think I will ever forget the experience. Eric had been working for about a half hour on his laptop when I was ushered into the room. An iPod was dangling from his neck, the earbuds cranking out Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, and Green Day as his left hand reflexively tapped the backbeat. The laptop had at least 11 windows open [added comment: sound familiar?]including two IM screens carrying out simultaneous conversations with MySpace friends. Another window was busy downloading an image from Google. The window behind it had the results of some graphic he was altering for MySpace friend No 2, and the one behind that held an old Pong game paused mid-ping.

Buried in the middle of this activity was a word-processing program holding the concepts of the paper for which I was to provide assistance. “The music helps me concentrate,” Eric declared, taking a call on his cell phone. “I normally do everything at school, but I’m stuck. Thanks for coming.” Stuck indeed. Eric would make progress on a sentence or two, then tap out a MySpace message, then see if the download was finished, then return to his paper. Clearly Eric was not concentrating on his paper. Sound like someone you know?

To put it bluntly, research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously. Eric and the rest of us must jump from one thing to the next.”

The rest of the chapter explains how our brains work and it was an “aha” experience for me to read. I think that it confirms both the fact that kids learn differently than we did and some multitasking keeps us from “attention-rich inputs”. What we often think of as multitasking is consecutive attention changes.

He goes on to what may be the most helpful part of this chapter where he explains the 10 minute rule. I will not go into that, but I think it is probably worth the price of the book for any teacher or lecturer. I am guessing that some people do it without thinking and that is why they are great teachers or presenters…. but the rest of us need to think about this. What do you think? What have you observed in yourself or in your students?