EdCampMN reflections

I attended the 2011 Hamline University Teaching and Technology Institute which was organized following the EdCamp model. This highly participatory model of professional development draws on the experiences and needs specific to the attendees as the agenda is not set until the morning of the event as participants propose topics and then proceed to vote on the ones they’d most like to attend.  The participants were roughly 120 teachers, the majority being K-12 public school teachers from Minnesota.  I heard about the conference over Twitter and was able to meet in person a couple of people I’d followed for a while on my network, @thehomeworkdog and @cathycrea, and was able to convince a couple of my former colleagues from Forest Lake High School, @bio_bward and @bruceleventhal to attend with me.

Overall I thought the organization and running of the event was very good thanks to @anderscj and @sschwister. Since the edcamp format was new for everyone, I think the organizers could have been more explicit in helping people understand what the expectations of proposing topic were.  Does that mean you had to have a presentation ready? (some did, others didn’t) Do you need to be able to teach others about the topic? (some did, others were wanting to learn) So to make it even better next time (and I will be organizing one) I’d try a format to match skills people who could lead to what topics interest the attendees.  Perhaps you could do this by not just asking for topic proposals, but you could enter “topics I want to learn about” and “topics I have something to share about”.
Also, attending the conference for free is great, but maybe more people would have attended (over 150 registered) if they had to pay even a small fee of like $20.
Nonetheless, it was a great conference and even though I was worried myself about switching out of “summer mode” I learned a lot, met some great people, and most importantly, had some great conversations.

Observation 1: Public Education funding in Minnesota is broken, teachers are not
I was really stunned by all the troubling conversations buzzing around me by the public school teachers which focused firmly on  the ramifications of several years of uncertainty and decline in school budgets. Every time I sat down with teachers talk inevitably turned to who had a job for next year (shockingly, several attendees I met were still in limbo) and doing what as specialist positions like the one I enjoy are going the way of the dinosaur.
The impact of inadequate funding was also evident in discussions about technology equipment and training.  Several teachers I talked to have given up on funding technology via normal school budgets and have resorted to back door methods to get equipment in front of their students including grant writing. Though for many grant funding seems like a viable way to get technology equipment I question whether the time to write and administer a grant is the best use of regular classroom teacher’s time. Put this on top of increasing class sizes (30 plus in some cases) and the test-prep pressure, I really can’t blame teachers for not making the effort to panhandle for the resources they need.
The teachers themselves did not complain really. I was amazed by the professionalism and enthusiasm shown by everybody in the room. There was no negativity and the place was buzzing with excitement about the possibilities technology could bring to learning. As was mentioned by a person in one of the sessions I attended (might have been an ADE) we need to turn the conversation from “yes, but…” into “yes, and…” Only then can we stop seeing barriers and begin seeing opportunities.

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The edcamp sessions were sandwiched into a more traditional institute format with a keynote speaker at the beginning and one to close.  Both of the speakers were Google Certified Teachers and therefore “google” was the most-mentioned word of the day by far. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that, though having two GCTs may have been overkill.  I learned about a lot of features of the Google platform that I’ll definitely put into the mix of my tech activities.  The main message of the two keynotes was clear to me, but maybe not to everybody: information and facts are available to everybody in increasingly easy, seamless ways – stop teaching information and facts!
We know this, but why do we still feel like we have to teach content? Perhaps because we don’t have the training to know how to structure learning opportunities that engage kids in fact-finding and that we have an unease in the pit of our stomachs when every child in the room is in control of their own fact-finding – they may find different things and may understand these things in different ways that we do.  By and large, public schools are based on a model of consistent products, not individualization.
Look at the school lunch line…  in my day there was only one question “da chicken or da beef?” But what if I want a summer salad with grilled zucchini and gorgonzola? This is an elephant in the room that many colleagues have difficulty facing. Are we truly ready to embrace individualization of learning where not every student is on the same page on the same day, doing the same problem set, or even reading the same books?
The keynotes an others presented lots of examples of how information can be found, yet there was surprisingly little talk about digital literacy, citizenship, and safety.  Nobody mentioned filter bubbles, the personalized way Google and most others deliver search results which also effectively filters much of the web away from you. Why/when should we use other search tools such as Duck Duck Go that don’t collect or filter based on personal signals? How will students know whether the information they’re getting is good information?  I was underwhelmed with the critical thinking about information fluency on display. We have to get better this.

Observation 3: Learning can take place without teaching.
I’m not a huge fan of Khan Academy’s video modules (full disclosure – I’ve not watched them all) but I’ve had reports from students who use it that they love it and find Sal Khan engaging and like how he explains things.  But, one thing that the rising popularity of Khan Academy tells me is that we can leverage technology to give us up-to-the-minute data on the progress of every individual we teach.  And, since learning Math isn’t a linear progression from A -B – C as we’ve come to believe, we can still manage to know what each student is choosing to work on and their level of understanding based on feedback from assessments that complete along the way.

This has HUGE potential to transform schools as we know them.  Flipping the classroom is not only possible, but it becomes desirable when you have a situation where students are allowed to choose their own path and complete their learning journey at the pace and route they see fit.
Other support in thinking this way came from the Self Organized Learning Envoronment (SOLE) workshop a project born out of Sugata Mitra’s work on the “hole in the wall” computer project and the Gateshead experiment with the Granny Cloud.  The thing that struck me about this presentation though was the unease by some teachers in the room with “messy learning”.   Some want to control the questions, the process, and the answers.  Good questions are essential for SOLEs to work.  When I saw Mitra in November, he mentioned that a “romantic question” is critical to the success of this model.  The question “what are glaciers and how have they influenced Minnesota’s landscape?” is far from romantic to any student living today.  This could be reworked to become something like: “As you’d drive from SW MN to NE MN, tell us about what you’d see out the window,how it’s different and why” could become a Google map project with different points plotted along a path through our state represented by snapshots out the window to give us a view of the typical scenery and notes of geologic features that cause our unique distribution of soil and ecoregions. During the session we were shown video of a class in action where one computer is share with four students who worked on their question.  One thing was really obvious from video of class in action. The teacher only “sees” a few groups for a short time, probs visits each group but only sees a fraction of the group interaction.  How can she see better/more? She could employ video and have students make a search story to show their information gathering and evaluation process.  They need somebody, the Granny Cloud, admiring their work, but we also need data to track what they’ve done and how well a la Khan Academy.  These innovations are coming via technology, but more importantly, we have to change the way we think of school.  We have to be willing to abandon the large institution, consistent product modelfor a riskier, less certain, more individualized one.  The tools are there or coming, what about our attitudes and training?