After President Obama's Inaugural Address, I spoke with iTeam members and wrote about the connections of our iTeam work to his messages. Last night, President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress and reinforced one of the ideas of the discussions with iTeam members. Identify things that need to be done and take initiative to do them or recruit others to help you do them. Here, he shares the story of a student who took the initiative to recruit the President's help:
And I think about Ty'Sheoma Bethea, the young girl from that school I visited in Dillon, South Carolina - a place where the ceilings leak, the paint peels off the walls, and they have to stop teaching six times a day because the train barrels by their classroom. She has been told that her school is hopeless, but the other day after class she went to the public library and typed up a letter to the people sitting in this room. She even asked her principal for the money to buy a stamp. The letter asks us for help, and says: "We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president, so we can make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world. We are not quitters."
We are not quitters.
These words and these stories tell us something about the spirit of the people who sent us here. They tell us that even in the most trying times, amid the most difficult circumstances, there is a generosity, a resilience, a decency and a determination that perseveres; a willingness to take responsibility for our future and for posterity.
What will we do to identify needs and take the initiative to do them and recruit help from others that can assist?
The Carnegie Foundation for the Improvement of Teaching and Learning held a conference entitled "Tinkering as a mode of knowledge production in a digital age" and captured perspectives of several speakers on video. John Seeley Brown describes a new world for learning.
8:35: "Put my stamp on something and then pass it back to the community ..."
9:40: "Identity gets constructed in how I have participated in these networked communities..."
We watched snippets of this clip during our last iTeam meeting. Students clearly recognized that Brown was describing the process that they are helping to develop.
Farmington's Regional Technology Center has created the first accredited program in composite technologies as described in the following news article. What can we learn from this example of educational entrepreneurship? It seems as if the drive for change has come from John MacDonald, a teacher at the Center. He seems to have built from some prior experience with the technology. He recognized the opportunity and marshaled support for development of the comprehensive program. He seems to have developed visions of opportunities for his students and their school. Note that Harbor Technologies in Brunswick and Custom Composite Technologies in Bath, two innovative employers, are engaged supporters of the program despite the more than 60 miles that separate the program and the businesses.
In Farmington, MSAD 9's Foster Regional Applied Technology Center is the first Maine school to develop a state-accredited program in high-performance composite technologies. After years of teaching short units to his technology and pre-engineering classes, John MacDonald decided to make the technology a complete program.
"My goal is to provide a way for students to become skilled in this growing industry," MacDonald said. "At the same time, we can plant the seed for future entrepreneurial ventures."
The Maine Technology Institute gave him a $30,000 grant with the stipulation that FRATC must raise matching funds from in-kind donations of materials and expertise. MacDonald's grant funding launched the renovation of the school's 40-year-old converted industrial-arts lab. Old wiring, poor air quality, inefficient shop layout, and outdated equipment had to go. He replaced outdated sanding devices with dustless sanders and collectors, added vacuum infusion and pressure molding stations, a freezer, and a curing oven. He hasn't looked back. ... "Six of my eight students in my 2007 class have continued their education in the composites field." he said. "Ten students completed the training in 2008, and I have a full class enrolled for the next year." ... "I found Mr. Macdonald's composites program and facilities to be a classic example of educational entrepreneurship," he said. "What seems to make this program so unique is the innovative combination of basic educational elements, technical skill exercises, and 'adult-style' mentoring."
What can we do to help make this program less unique? How can we develop our own examples of educational entrepreneurship so that they become the norm rather than the exception?
MSAD 75 technology leaders are helping students and staff understand better practices for use of social networking sites like Facebook. Students seem to have broadly adopted recommended practices on restricting the display profile information. However, it seems to me that we have more work to do on helping ourselves and our students to understand another aspect of information sharing.
Facebook makes it possible for 3rd party application developers to tap into Facebook tools and data to provide new and innovative services: Facebook Apps. They run the range from trivial to serious (Facebook's own developer app that supports the development of other's apps). I suspect that many students choose to sign up for third party apps. I also suspect that students don't understand some of the implications of making these choices. Facebook provides information about what is shared in the following terms statement that users "accept" before they get access to an application:
(a) Information That May Be Provided to Developers. In order to allow you to use and participate in Platform Applications created by Developers ("Developer Applications"), Facebook may from time to time provide Developers access to the following information (collectively, the "Facebook Site Information"): ...
(b) Examples of Facebook Site Information. The Facebook Site Information may include, without limitation, the following information, to the extent visible on the Facebook Site: your name, your profile picture, your gender, your birthday, your hometown location (city/state/country), your current location (city/state/country), your political view, your activities, your interests, your musical preferences, television shows in which you are interested, movies in which you are interested, books in which you are interested, your favorite quotes, the text of your "About Me" section, your relationship status, your dating interests, your relationship interests, your summer plans, your Facebook user network affiliations, your education history, your work history, your course information, copies of photos in your Facebook Site photo albums, metadata associated with your Facebook Site photo albums (e.g., time of upload, album name, comments on your photos, etc.), the total number of messages sent and/or received by you, the total number of unread messages in your Facebook in-box, the total number of "pokes" you have sent and/or received, the total number of wall posts on your Wall™, a list of user IDs mapped to your Facebook friends, your social timeline, and events associated with your Facebook profile. user_terms
While Facebook restricts access to specific pieces of information and encourages users to control which information can be accessed, I think that we need to understand this aspect of social networking help ourselves and our students become better digital citizens.
students and help them understand issues of digital citizenship. As a district, we have committed ourselves to expanding our use of Web 2.0 tools to support learning and collaboration of students, teachers and administrators. iTeams are prototyping new uses. For example, we have been using a web-based form to collect Activity Logs for iTeams. Middle school iTeam members are using it in some exciting ways: I learned of a spontaneous student-initiated iTeam meeting because they reported it using the Activity Log. So, the process shows great promise but to date, they only use it intermittently. Members also check email at relatively low frequency. But I discovered recently that some students respond to Facebook messages much more reliably than email. I wondered whether we might tap into their engagement with Facebook.
Facebook supports integration of their tools into App providers' sites. Facebook developers have developed a demo application that illustrates some of the potential of this approach. Their app collects running log entries of app users. The Run Around demo also contains several of the elements that Sally and I have discussed. I wondered whether we could prototype the app we have discussed but I know that such development can be time-consuming. I encouraged a group of Stanford students to take an interest in the idea as a project for an e-Challenge project, a social business-plan competition. But they have not responded to my queries. So, what can we do to explore this approach? In the long-run, I hope that iTeam members will be able to take on such a project but we need more time and capacity development.
Since a Facebook development team has developed and tested this app, the learning curve for cloning their app is less demanding than creating an app from scratch. This approach is similar to the process that led to the rapid growth of the Internet in the 90's: copy an html page and revise it to meet your need. Since the approach worked for me during that period, I decided to commit a few hours to trying again with this new capacity.
The screenshot at the top of this entry shows FB tools running on a local host server. While it will require more effort to refine, I got it working with a relatively modest effort on my part. I hope the prototype will help us explain the ideas to colleagues who are less familiar with the abstract ideas and learn better from concrete examples. When we get additional supporters, we can put together the team required to go beyond a simple prototype.
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