Top #EdBlogs2013 Posts

2013 was a productive year that saw quite a bit of professional development and new thinking, highlighted by traveling, where I made new colleagues, and attending the Google Teacher Academy in Chicago. In reflecting on this year, +Eric Saibel has inspired colleagues who blog to share their most influential posts of 2013 for the #EdBlogs2013 series he's collecting, and I'm honored to participate (read his own post here). Taking a page from +David Theriault, who reworked the organization of the #EdBlog2013 idea (cf. his fantastic #EdBlogs2013 post), I'll reflect on 2013 thematically, organizing my post around some of the ideas that I've been interested in this year. And I'll keep the summaries of each post, so be sure to give them the love they deserve.

Innovation and Mindfulness

I've been very interested in creativity and innovation, along with the part that mindfulness plays, thanks to my PLN. I now believe that creativity is one of the most important skills that we should be teaching (alongside collaboration and empathy), and the following posts are just of the few of a growing body of literature that has helped me to think this way.

• Daniel Goleman, whose book Focus I enjoyed, has a couple of posts shared in LinkedIn on mindfulness and creativity that I enjoyed reading: Three Must-Haves for Team Creativity and Mindfulness: When Focus Means Single-Tasking.

New Pioneers blog

• Collisions of Creativity from the magazine Mindful is a good piece on the relationship between mindfulness and creativity.

• Lee-Anne Gray (@DrLeeAnneG) wrote a great post on the need for mindfulness in education as a source of innovation titled Why Mindfulness is Needed For Education Innovation.

• I love the idea of starting a "life hacker" club build around the modern world, as outlined in Start a Life Hacker Club at Your School by Adam Renfro in the +Getting Smart blog.

• Stephanie Harrison's (@cultivace) This will make you happier at work is a great post on bringing mindfulness into the workplace, offering several suggestions for doing so. Creating a mindful culture within the workplace is one of my long-term goals, assuming that, if teachers are generally more mindful and happy, we can also help students to be more mindful and happy.

• Finally, this academic year I began to realize the importance of the relationship between pedagogy and physical space and never fully appreciated it, until +Alice Keeler led a revelatory session at #edcampSFBay last August on the topic. The conversation was inspiring, and +Kevin Ashworth followed it up with his own room redesign in a 2-part blog post on his work (Part 1 | Part 2). We're undertaking our own room redesigns of History, Visual Arts, and World Languages classrooms, and Kevin's work will serve as a source of inspiration for us to craft true collaborative space for our students in a mindful manner.

Design Thinking

Mindfulness and design thinking are very similar in a number of ways; to my mind, mindfulness is an internal application of the external principles of design thinking, and they're both critically dependent on problem definition and system awareness. In designing new forms of pedagogy, especially around technology, I've tried to keep a number of basic principles in mind, and the following posts.

• Last winter/spring's #etmooc was the first digital experience that opened me up to the value of taking risks and the importance of building a PLN. In particular, +Christina Hendricks wrote a post Etmooc: Rhizomatic Learning In Philosophy Courses on the concept of "rhizomatic learning." which was one of the first blog posts I read that challenged the way I thought about learning and pedagogy.

Creative Confidence

• Eric Saibel wrote a great piece The Art of Coaching: Or, Disrupting the Echo Chamber that has helped to give me a framework to apply design thinking at our school, particularly the concept of the disruption and the "echo chamber," or the repetitiveness of thinking that we can find ourselves stuck in as a group that too often prevents us from identifying the core of a problem.

• Grant Wiggins, in his post Beyond teacher egocentrism: design thinking, has some great thoughts on what design thinking means in education, and he share some of the same ideas I have about the ways that the ego gets in the way of creating this type of environment.

• In an important discussion about transparency in education, Brad Ovenell-Carter (@Braddo) asks the question Can a radical transparency replace grading?. It's short but asks a great question that opens up discussion of standards-based grading and general openness, of which we still have far too little.

• Though not published in 2013, Cathy Davidson's (@CathyNDavidson) idea of crowdsourced grading in How to Crowdsource Grading grabbed my attention. I haven't yet put this idea to use in this form, but I love the approach to empowering students in this way.

Gamification

2013 was the year of gamification for me. I got to know the concept in the spring, though through some ideas of the summer, and now I'm working toward creating a gamified Latin IA course around our new 1:1 BYOL program. Fortunately, a number of excellent blog posts have helped me with the work.

• Tanya Sasser's (@TanyaSasser) post 3 Things I Wish Everyone Knew about Gamification corrects some common misconceptions about the role of game-based learning and gamification in education.

playwaresrudios.com

• +Rory Newcomb has a fantastic blog series on gamification, starting with Gamification 101: Why Gamify? Part I. It's a minefield of great ideas for anyone interested in game-based learning.

• +Jennifer Roberts has some helpful words of advice on the importance of good game design  in her post Broken Games.

• And last but certainly not least, IDEO founders Tom and David Kelley have a great post on the real-world value that games have for learning with How Daydreams and Videogames Can Make Us Confident In Real Life (Yes).

Quisquiliae

I'll close with some random yet influential posts on professional development, the MOOC, language study and the humanities in general.

• +David Theriault's The Magnificent 60: Introducing Your #gtachi Participants is brilliant for so many reasons, mostly because it paints such a colorful picture of all the amazing people who participated in the #gtachi last July.

• At the beginning of last summer, +Jennifer Peyrot shared her Summer Learning Fun on her blog, which helped me to rethink how I approach the summer. In particular, it's a good idea to plan out some activities to ensure a fairly high level of productivity, lest it go by too quickly.

• In August, I had the opportunity to help +Nancy Minicozzi organize and run the PlaydateLA conference. Her reflections in Playdate L.A. capture the excitement I also felt for providing PD to over 100 people, rather than receiving it at an event. It was such a positive experience that the PlaydateLA team is already looking forward to doing it again next August.

• If you're not yet a regular reader of the digital journal Hybrid Pedagogy, run in part by +Jesse Stommel, I highly recommend having a look. His post The March of the MOOCs: Monstrous Open Online Courses, along with the #moocmooc event last summer, helped me to see the larger possibilities of connectivism and constructivism that the MOOC can bring to education.

• Language teachers are always concerned with promoting language programs, especially as STEM disciplines grow in popularity. +Dana Ariss wrote a great post Learning Languages: Who Says You Can't? that underscores the value that language study has for resilience and taking control of learning. I'm now interested in promoting an "Hour of Language" in a way similar to December's Hour of Code event.

• Along with the diminishing interest in language study, the Humanities have also been suffering (cf. what's happening at the university level). Ben Stern understands Why Humanities Still Matter In 2013, however, and argues a strong case for the importance of the Humanities in understanding the world we interact with.

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That wraps up my 2013, more or less. In addition to blogs, I've also been reading a fair number of books that have all shaped my thinking to a large degree, and I've share some thoughts here on a few of them. But as we begin 2014 (and now that my coding streak has finished!), I plan on carving time to read more blogs, and I'll be looking forward to the ideas that develop from them in this year.

Sunshine Gratitude

I owe +Megan Valois (@msvalois) and +Karl Lindgren-Streicher (@LS_Karl) some gratitude for sharing their Sunshine posts with me a few weeks ago, and I'm happy to finally respond with my first post of 2014.

Here's how Sunshine posts work:

1. Acknowledge the nominating blogger
2. Share 11 random facts about myself.
3. Answer the 11 questions the nominating blogger has created for me.
4. List 11 bloggers that I believe deserve some recognition and a little blogging love! (These people can't include the blogger who nominated me.)
5. Post 11 questions for the bloggers I nominate.

Part 1. Nominators  I got to know Megan on Twitter, and even though we were both at QC GAFE in Montreal last month, I never got a chance to say hi to her in person. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to meet her in person soon. She's one of the mods of #cdnedchat happening Monday nights at 5pm PST, which is chock-full of great educators north of the boarder.

Karl and I got to know each other last summer on Twitter, and we met in person at the amazing #edcampSFBay last August. He's become one of my closest allies within my PLN, and I consider myself fortunate to count him among my colleagues and friends (even though he lives in the Bay Area and doesn't bleed Giants orange!). Make an effort to get to know this guy.

Part 2. 11 Facts About Me

1. My real name is "Maurice." In England, it ends up as Morris, but in Ireland it's pronounced more like "Marce," which then ends up as "Moss" colloquially. The name has been in my family for generations, and if not for my grandfather on my dad's side, I'd have been a Moss, V or something along those lines.
2. I was born and raised in Las Vegas, NV. Spent the first 18 years of my life there, before going to college and I'm apparently one of the few natives.
3. I wear flip-flops year-around and I don't think it's odd. Others do, however, especially those back East. It's one of the perks of living in Southern CA.
4. My undergraduate degree is in Applied and Engineering Physics, but in my junior year, I instead decided to pursue Classics (MA) and linguistics (PhD) in graduate school.
5. Thanks to all that time in graduate school, I now think that PB&J is just about the best food ever.
6. I'm a huge craft beer geek (a trait I share with Karl!). I love West-Coast IPAs most and will drink anything with Columbus hops.
7. I'm a rabid sports fan, with baseball placed above and beyond everything else. Growing up in the desert, I was drawn to cool, open grass fields. As I hinted above, I'm a diehard San Francisco Giants fan and have made a tradition out of seeing a few spring training games in AZ each year. College football comes second (UCLA Bruins!), and I'm a big fan of Cornell University hockey (my alma mater).
8. I'm a music snob, with a proclivity toward guitar-based music. I love post-metal and post-rock, including bands like Converge, ISIS, Jesu, Explosions in the Sky, to cite just a few. 80s pop and 90s grunge, though, will always have a place in my heart, and it goes without saying that Spotify is still my favorite "gadget."
9. I'm an avid yogi and a second-series ashtangi. Though I've moved away from my beloved ashtanga studio, I try to practice as much as possible.
10. I love reading. Until last spring, I read almost exclusively fiction, including anything by Pynchon and Bolaño. Lately, though, I've been reading mostly nonfiction, with a tendency toward cognitive science and positive psychology.
11. I coded on codecademy.com every day in 2013, with a streak of 367 days. Now, I think I'll move on to duolingo.com.

Hadrian's Wall

Part 3. 11+ Questions for Me (merging Megan and Karl's questions)

• What’s your favorite thing about blogging or tweeting? 

Connecting with other educators who think in similar ways as me but still push my thinking in new directions. I love the reflection process in putting my ideas down on a page for others to read. Tweeting and especially blogging has made me think of myself as more of a professional educator.

• Favorite hobby?

Tough one. It could be yoga or reading.

• Favorite movie of all time?

Have to go with Heat, followed closely by Real Genius. Heat is so "Iliadic" it pitting two single-minded people against each other. It's a great example of storytelling driven by art and character, including Los Angeles itself.

• Favorite place you have traveled?

The most amazing travel experience I've had was in Northern England a few years ago, when I drove along Hadrian's Wall in exploration of Roman Britain.

• Favorite Twitter chat? 

Easy; #caedchat, thanks both to all the amazing people participating in it every Sunday night, as well as to the fact that I've had the good fortune to meet many of them in person.

• Favorite educational website - person or product? 

I have to go with Google Drive, if that counts. I use it more than everything else combined.

• If you had a superpower, what would it be? 

I'd choose to control time, whether it's stopping it or traveling back to the past. I'd love to see ancient Greece, Rome, and India in action.

• Favorite book you’ve read in 2013? 

Looking back at what I've read in 2013, I'm not sure which was the favorite. I loved Drive, and Thinking, Fast and Slow, but I might pick Reality is Broken, thanks to the fact that it opened my eyes to gamification and positive psychology. For fiction, I'll go with Pynchon's Bleeding Edge.

• Why teaching?

I love the dynamic and intellectual interaction of learning and exchanging ideas with both students and other teachers. And I love sharing things I have a passion for with others, with the hopes that they'll do the same for me. It's incredible to have an opportunity to get to show people why the Latin language (and ancient languages in general) can be so interesting.

• If you could make one change to the educational system in the US or Canada, what would it be?

I'd get rid of standardized testing, including SATs and APs. More and more, I see how little they contribute toward student growth and teacher innovation and I don't want to participate in this kind of system.

• What is the most important characteristic you look for in your friends?

Empathy and an awareness of what's going on around them, including the ability and willingness to listen.

• What teacher had the biggest impact on your life? How did they impact you? Does this teacher know the impact they had on you?

My AP Language teacher Bobbie Cartwright. She was the first teacher who pushed me to really think through an idea and organize it on a page. She went far beyond the "textbook" and had us talking about real-world issues, like education. I still remember her prefacing the education unit by saying that it'd be the most controversial and heated one of the year, which no one believed. But sure enough, she was right, and I think about her often every time I find myself in such a discussion today.

She was diagnosed with lung cancer the spring before my junior year, but she kept teaching into the following spring, until her treatment forced her to leave teaching. When we said our goodbyes to her, she grabbed me by the shoulders and said, "Maurice, you have a good brain. Use it." Until now, I've only told this story to a handful of people.

• What is the biggest risk you've ever taken in your life? How did it work out?

I left a career in engineering behind for Classics, and I'm quite happy I did!

• I'll let you off the hook with an easy one: when are you coming to the Bay Area next so we can hang out and I can steal all your best ideas? (With attribution of course!)

As soon as possible, and hopefully before the 2014 MLB season starts! Keep me posted on any and all Bay-Area education meetings.

Part 4. My 11 Nominations  I'm going with some hometown favorites, #gtachi colleagues, and PlaydateLA collaborators below who are great people and great educators. I've met them all in person, other than Eric whom I'll meet very soon I hope, and always look forward to spending face-to-face time with them. I've known Jen Carey for more than 12 years, when we were Classics and archaeology in grad school, and as luck would have it, we're now both in education. If you're not yet following any of them, now's the time to start!

• +JR Ginex-Orinion (@gochemonline)
• +Jennifer Carey (@TeacherJenCarey)
• +Isis Stephanie Cerda (@Ms_Cerda)
• +Alice Chen (@WonderTechEdu)
• +Dominique Dynes (@DominiqueDynes)
• Regan Galvan (@ReganGalvan)
• +Chris Long (@clonghb)
• +Jennifer Peyrot (@JenPeyrot)
• +Eric Saibel (@ecsaibel)
• +David Theriault (@davidtedu)
• +Sean Ziebarth (@MrZiebarth)

Part 5. My 11 Questions Mixing and matching a few questions from others, while adding a few of my own.

1. If you weren't teaching, what would you be doing?
2. What do you like best about teaching?
3. How do you deal with the stress of the teaching schedule?
4. What was your favorite class you've taken and why?
5. How do you like to spend your summers?
6. Name one place you'd drop everything to visit right now.
7. List your 3 most influential reads.
8. You've just found a time machine. Do you go forward or backward and why?
9. Name one conference you're geeked about attending this year.
10. What's a passion project or 20%-time activity you'd like to work on this year?
11. Share one of your bucket-list activities.

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Thanks again to Megan and Karl for including me in their Sunshine posts! I'm looking forward to continuing our conversations in the future, and I'm excited to read the responses to my nominations (when you have the time, of course!).

Innovation and Growth

From the BigHeads Network

In a recent conversation on growth and professional development, I was surprised by some of the defensive ideas that came up in the discussion, namely, rejecting potentially valuable feedback, hiding failure, and playing it safe when setting goals. These are the same ideas that have been recycled in education for years that are preventing growth. To be fair, what "growth" means in education can be hard to pin down, given that the definition is often personal and isn't always shared with others. Most basically, I think, growth means getting better at the craft of teaching, but what does mean to be "better?"

To my mind, growth involves a large component of innovation, especially as more and more schools are moving toward blended-learning 1:1 programs. Innovation, of course, is often based on using technology in the classroom to a greater extent; but it more importantly requires us to change the way we think about solving problems. Innovation isn't simply putting homework assignments online. And so, I can't help but believe that these often-held assumptions about what growth is are preventing us from the kind of innovation that's possible right now. In order to move forward with our professional growth goals and innovate, we need to rethink these assumptions and change our culture toward one that promotes growth over fear, since within a culture of fear, growth and innovation are almost impossible. Though there are certainly other behaviors that promote growth and innovation, I'll list here a few specific ones that I have been thinking on, inspired in part by Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From.

Involve Students in the Process

It makes no sense to me to ignore students in the feedback process we use to evaluate ourselves and "grow." We're designing new curriculum around them, after all, using phrases like "collaborative work," "student centered," and "personalized" for the curricular changes we intend to make. Ideas thrive when they're not only shared between teachers, but also when they're shared with the students who will be subjected to them, and in order to innovate, we need to listen to their feedback.

Embrace Failure and the Attempt at Innovation

It also makes no sense for us to hide our failures and avoid trying new things, lest they don't work out. There's nothing that's more "fixed growth" (cf. Dweck's Mindset) than being afraid to try something new because you don't want others to learn that it didn't work. That's no way to grow, and it shouldn't be a model for students to learn.

Think Big

I learned at #gtachi this summer that we need to think big if we want to innovate—it's the Google way. No one has ever changed the world by thinking small, and we're certainly not going to teach the next generation how to solve the significant problems that threaten the world by thinking like this. The bigger the goals we set, the greater the number of people involved, typically, which can help lead a school down a more innovative path.

Reflect as Often as Possible

Growth and innovation require constant reflection and refining, rather than thinking about personal and/or departmental goals once a year. This is where failure is actually advantageous and critical for the process of innovation, since it helps us to constantly refine our goals, as we move closer toward them.

Open Your Mind

Finally, innovation and growth require us to embrace diversity and welcome new ideas into our own frame of thinking (cf. more on this below). Albert Einstein, who is the source of several famous quotations on innovation, said that "we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them," and this is precisely why we need to think openly, not defensively, and embrace diversity for the benefit that it can bring to our own ways of thinking. More connections within our Personal Learning Network (PLN) hinders stale thinking and increases our exposure to new ideas that may help us to innovate and facilitates reflection on these ideas.

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I've been reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow on cognitive processes underlying how we think, which has proven to be quite fascinating. In particular, it's interesting to consider the differences between our "System 1" and "System 2" processes. System 1 is "automatic and quick, with little voluntary control," basically providing us with our first-impression thoughts. System 2, on the other hand, gives our attention to "effortful mental activity" and is "associated with subjective agency and choice" (20). System 2 is what we use to ask and think through questions that aren't intuitively obvious to System 1. But System 2 is lazy and often defers to System 1, especially when it's tired or overworked.

Kahneman introduces the pertinent idea of WYSIATI ("What You See Is All There Is") that, thanks to the way System 1 works, has us "jumping to conclusions on the basis of limited evidence" in experiment after experiment. Moreover, WYSIATI facilitates coherence of events (i.e. seeing relationships between things), even when there is none, and leads to cognitive ease, which causes us to give too much weight our first impressions, rather than carefully evaluating the evidence presented to us (86-87). Importantly, WYSIATI is based on our experiences and current collection of ideas in our heads.

I don't know many teachers, if any, who have plenty of free time and need extra work. Because we're so mentally drained, all too frequently, I think that we let System 2 give way to System 1 too often and fall back on what we already know, which is why innovation in education has been painfully slow. It's precisely why these old ideas have been kept around for so long. To pursue growth in whatever way that it is meaningful to us, we need a good measure of innovation, and to innovate, we need to explore new ideas so that we don't fall back on old patterns, just because they're all too comfortable and familiar.

McGonigal, in her fantastic book Reality is Broken, wrote that it's "easier to change minds than behaviors" (186), and I think she's right. With that, how do we change our culture toward a model that openly encourages growth and innovation? After an inspiring discussion on innovation last night on #caedchat, I'm also curious to know how people define growth an innovation. Feel free to share your thoughts here or with me on Twitter at @mosspike.

Change and the Giving up the Ego

endlessorigami.com

Someone recently mentioned to me that "change requires giving something up." At the time, I wasn't sure how much I believed it, but after thinking about it for a week, I do now. Depending on what kind of change is being proposed, there's a variety of answers to the question of what should be given up; but in more cases than not in education, based on what the conversations I've had, it's the ego that's at the center of this discussion.

Early in graduate school, I was giving a paper at a conference, with Joshua Katz, a brilliant Classicist and Indo-Europeanist from Princeton, in attendance. Afterward, we chatted about it, and he told me that he liked the paper right before he asked me, "Do you believe it?" I was shocked at first, but I quickly realized that he wasn't being critical. Instead, Katz was telling me indirectly that research wasn't always about being right; rather, it's about the exploration of ideas and the fact that it's not necessary to believe in an idea 100%, before sharing it.

Later, I had the great fortune to work with Calvert Watkins, who also reinforced this way of doing research. Despite being one of the most prolific and greatly respected Indo-European linguists in the field, he openly encouraged colleagues to criticize his work, with the hope that our understanding would only grow. He never put his ego before the ideas.


Team Geek and and the Ego

"If you spend all your time working alone, you're increasing the risk of failure and cheating your potential for growth" (Team Geek 5).

Thanks to Brian Fitzpatrick's great presentation at GTACHI about the principles that govern how software teams work well together, I've picked up his book Team Geek (co-authored with Ben Collins-Sussman). It's about good leadership practices, including the role that the ego plays in being a leader, namely, its destructive power (Team Geek 66-67). Reading through Fitzpatrick and Collins-Sussman's experience with ego, I'm more certain than ever that the changes that need to happen to build stronger learning environments in our schools requires us to give up our egos, as Katz and Watkins taught me.

During some recent professional development work, in which we were talking about the power of a backchannel, some complaints were offered about the students' ability to focus on the teacher and the lecture, if their attention was directed to the backchannel. Basically, I heard several questions of the sort "If students are not listening to me, then how can they be learning?", which sheds much light on the lecture-centered culture that continues to pervade education.

I can't help but interpret this attitude as driven by ego that stands in the way of change toward a more student-centered structure. As Fitzpatrick and Collins-Sussman argue, ego gets in the way of the kind of trust that gives a team (or students, in this case) a sense of accountability and ownership of their work. I fully agree and will add two other points that I blame on ego:

• A lack of trust within a team engenders a fear of failure, when then creates a closed community, rather than an open environment, where team members feel welcome to share ideas.
• Egos also create defensive cultures, where change and new ideas are too frequently met with judgment and second-guessing, instead of curiosity and enthusiasm. Cf. Daniel Pink's concept of "buoyancy" (discussed here) and responding to ideas with "Yes and...", rather than "No" or "But..." (To Sell 193).

Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, discusses the "cognitive ease" (59) that dulls our otherwise rational logic. When our minds are strained, we are prone to suspicion and are less intuitive and creative (59), so, based on this fact, systematically being on the defensive during conversations and meetings prevents us from being innovative by finding new and creative ways to solve our problems.

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I learned from Katz, Watkins, and several others, including, above all, my advisor, Brent Vine, that it's ok to be wrong, and, moreover, that it's important to take ownership of failure. It's the attempt and the process that's more important for learning than the results. In many way, then, my experience in graduate school can be seen as a sort of extended #20time project (however tortuous!), since it teaches that exploration and failure go together. Of course, that kind of positive experience depends critically on the quality of the mentoring. I was fortunate to have mentors who relished in the role, and they have set bar for my own expectations in dealing with colleagues and students.

With that, I'm looking forward to giving up any ego and any expectation of control this year. I hope to participate in creating the type of environment where we work together, feeling comfortable and even excited to try new things, and one one that believes "if you're not failing now and then, you're not being innovative enough or taking enough risks" (Team Geek 18).

What are you giving up and why?

A Shallow Collective?

As I begin my summer reading binge, I've been trying to balance my consumption of pro-technology materials to include anything that offers alternative and/or critical views of the new (e.g. tech.-focused) directions in education. Much like I've argued with questions of the value of foreign language, I think it's healthy to face and even embrace criticism, since it helps us to build a fuller understand of why we do certain things in certain ways through reflection, lest our ideas become dogmatic or myopic.

With that, I recently read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, followed immediately by Douglas Thomas and John Brown's A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, which seem to have been written for one another, despite having no apparent knowledge of the other book's existence (other than a single citation in New Culture without any explicit commentary on Shallows). It's proven quite interesting to read both books in succession, since in many respects they occupy entirely different ends of the technological spectrum and can thus be read as criticism of each other in the regard mentioned above.

Carr's Shallows, an "exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences" (cf. this video summary), gives a thought-provoking challenge to those who advocate technology. Carr's thesis is that the increased use and even dependence on the internet is affecting our attention, focus, and deep-thinking skills, and he presents a rather impressive collection of evidence in favor of the neurological consequences of certain technologies. Since finishing it a week ago, I've been thinking more about the broader applications of technology in education in light of his conclusions, and I'll outline just a few of the ideas that I've found interesting.

The first few chapters paint a 2000-year intellectual history of literary culture and the relation to the neuroplasticity of the brain, before he probes the internet's more recent effects on our thinking. One of his main criticisms is that more information necessarily allows less time to use it (Shallows 170), which then leads him to a short and subtle attack against Google's search engine (Shallows 72). And with less time spent in reflection and deep thought, we're unable to achieve a high level of memorization (Shallows 177), since the internet harms "working memory" (Shallows 193) and our attentiveness (Shallows 193-4).

Going even farther, Carr claims that the "offloading of memory" poses a threat to our very culture: "Outsource culture, and memory withers" (Shallows 197). We can even lose our "humanity" by relying so heavily on the internet (Shallows 207, 220), and we pay the price via alienation from each other (Shallows 211).  To my mind, Carr's claims at times tend toward the sensational, but that's not to say that they should be dismissed.

If The Shallows can be read as the critic's cautionary tale against the increased use of technology, then New Culture champions the proponent's response.  For what it's worth, New Culture doesn't privilege technology in its discussion or even discuss very many specific examples of tech. tools.  Instead, it's about, as the title makes clear, the "new culture of learning" that technology and the "fluid infrastructure of the twenty-first century" (New Culture 17) has given us. Nearly everything that Carr offers as evidence for the dangers to thinking that internet brings to the brain finds a response in New Culture, and the two books couldn't present two more contrary views of the cultural value of technology.

The ideas in New Culture are centered around the "collective" environment, where "teachers no longer need to scramble to provide the latest up-to-date information to students because the students themselves are taking an active role in helping to create and mold it, particularly in areas of social information" (New Culture 52).  The new learning collective, then, is far from the solitary experience that Carr describes in The Shallows.

The "new culture of learning about the kind of tension that develops when students with an interest or passion that they want to explore are faced with a set of constraints that allow them to act only within given boundaries" (New Culture 81).  That is to say, taking advantage of the new media in education is more than simply unleashing students on internet; rather, there's a concerted attempt to incorporate innovation, combining structure with freedom (New Culture 48-9).

In the old mod model of education, students learn about world and their learning culture was precisely equal to their environment, within the "intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration" (Shallows 114); but in the new model, they learn with world (New Culture 38) and their culture emerges from environment (New Culture 37-8). The learning community is constructed such that its members are constantly referencing each other (New Culture 25) and learning from other's experiences (New Culture 29), with the result that they learn more than just "data":  their learning is "personal" and students are thus more invested (New Culture 31), in contrast to being "alienated" by technology (Shallows 211).

It's proven interesting to read these two books in succession, given the seemingly contradictory ideas they propose.  If I have any criticism of my own to levy against The Shallows, it's that Carr is too "traditional" in his outlook. He has overlooked the communal advantage that the internet and social media offer to today's students. Carr openly acknowledges that the world is shifting to the paradigm of digital culture and away from solitary reading and "intellectualism" (Shallows 108), but, aside from the argument against attention loss, it's not clear to me from his conclusions why such a shift can only have negative consequences.

I'm not one to dismiss intellectualism, but I also don't think that the world needs more solitary intellectuals right now. Thomas and Brown claim that "[a]lmost every difficult issue we face today is a collective, rather than a personal, problem" (New Culture 59), and it seems that these sorts of problems that we face and will continue to face can only be effectively addressed through collaboration.

While Carr laments the "outsourcing" of memorization (Shallows 181), Thomas and Brown applaud the shift away from it (New Culture 43). Digital culture allows students to ask more inquiry-based questions like "what are the things that we don't know and what questions can we ask about them?" (New Culture 83), where answers serve as starting points for other questions. I couldn't help but think of Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiment, in which he gave kids in India access to the internet and watched as they collectively taught themselves how to use it. These kids look like anything but automatons who have been "numbed" from overexposure to the internet.

Carr's critical attitude toward Google is patently clear (Shallows 172), as are his beliefs about the price we pay for digitizing the world's libraries.  Thomas and Brown, on the other hand, offer a real-world example whereby Google was used by a neophyte coder to learn from his mistakes by using Google to find solutions and improve his work in the process (New Culture 26).

Though Carr argues that dependence on the internet leads one to lose identity by viewing it as an extension of themselves (Shallows 219), Thomas and Brown believe that digital culture via "collective indwelling" actually helps to create identity by giving students the opportunity to question their relationship with others through "hanging out" (New Culture 101) and by giving themselves more personal agency through "messing around" (New Culture 103). Most of all, "[g]eeking out provides an experiential, embodied sense of learning withing a rich social context of peer interaction, feedback, and knowledge construction enabled by a technological infrastructure that promotes 'intense, autonomous, interest driven' learning" (New Culture 104).  9-year-old Sam illustrated the example of the "new culture" well, in that he is able to take advantage of collective learning not only to improve his knowledge of programming, but to improve his overall understanding of citizenship (New Culture 20-21) — an understated but crucially important result of an effective collective.

In the end, while I disagree some of Carr's conclusions in favor of the ideas in New Culture, he does an excellent job of collecting various studies on brain development and behavior to show how technology can affect our brains. For instance, it's clear that we learn much worse when distracted, as has been shown through various experiments (cf. especially Shallows 133). Carr's challenges to the growing importance of technology allows us to reflect on the purpose behind our choices. Whether beginning a 1;1 program, moving students to an LMS, or even just doing digital media projects, we should be clear about our goals, and we should never use technology simply to use technology. It's up to educators to craft the right kind of collective environment for our students so we don't end up too shallow or too deep.

If interested in the intersection of pedagogy and education, I suggest reading both of these fantastic books.  The #CAedchat summer book club will hold Twitter discussions on each of them over the next few months, where I'll be eagerly looking forward to continuing the discussion about these ideas.

Connected Learning and Blogs

Though we've been using the "CMS" (course management system) since grad. school, the concept of "connected learning" still seems relatively new to education.  It's only about a year ago that our school began to pursue options for what we now call an "LMS" (learning management system).  Until this fall, only about 10% of faculty regularly used Moodle pages for their courses, and we wanted improve on that.

After evaluating the available options, we decided to adopt Instructure's Canvas as our LMS.  Unlike Moodle, which most faculty disliked for a multitude of reasons, we are all now strongly urged to maintain a presence on Canvas, affectionately called "the Hub" on our campus.  Canvas offers many features, which has been both good and bad for us.  It's good, in that it allows each faculty member to develop each course in a way that best suits them; but that's also bad, since students are then required to use each course page in different ways and have spent quite a good deal of time simply figuring out how to navigate each course.  For example, one teacher's "assignments" are another's "announcements" and another's "discussions", etc.  After initial discomfort, though, our students have adjusted.

In addition to the Hub, we've also become a Google Apps For Education (GAFE) school this year.  Initially, most faculty avoided GAFE, while they were learning how to manage the Hub, but lately and for several reasons — namely, the fact that materials are easier to share — more faculty (fortunately!) have embraced Google's tools, especially for school administration, and it seems that we've enjoyed a higher level of productivity, thanks to them.

Our school is large, at least for an independent school, and because our faculty have been creating their own PLNs, our system looks chaotic right now.  I can't say that we currently have a pervasive PLN that promotes connected learning in an efficient way, but we're on our way.  This tells me that we haven't yet embraced connected learning as openly as we could (and should?).  In the #ETMOOC description for topic 1 on connected learning, some great discussion questions on this topic are asked, and three questions in particular strike me as most important in our stage of techno-curricular development:

1. How important connected learning is to us?
2. Can our institution support connected learning, and if so, how?
3. How can we spread these ideas among our faculty?

I'm, of course, a big believer in connected learning, given that the idea of sharing has always been one of my great motivations for both learning and teaching.  I've been doing various things to advocate it this year, and the most interesting and useful tool I've started using is the blog.  My Latin III students have always had to keep a "Running Latin Commentary" or "RLC" in my class that's used to record notes on vocabulary, grammar/syntax, style, and plot, including anything else of interest that strikes them.  They work on these notes at home on their own, then we add to them in class.  It's a tough skill to learn, but it also approximates the sort of analytical work that we do in the professional world of Classics.  Each night, they record their reading notes and thoughts in a blog, rather than keeping them on paper, and we then work from them in class together.  I'm more easily able to monitor their work and give them feedback, and they're more easily able to keep their work for the course organized.

The experiment has been going very well, and I will continue to use blogs at our school.  I believe commenting is important precisely because it has the potential to promote the high level of connected learning that I'd like to see among my students by improving the quality of their own commentary, creating more lateral dialogue, and getting students to communicate more with each other.  I've been surprised, though, at how reluctant they are to read each other's blogs and offer commentary.  It's almost perceived as a point of pride to avoid looking at their classmates' work.  Hence, I too am confounded with the question of the value of commenting and have been thinking of ways to increase blog reading beside writing (cf. +Sue Waters' questions on the value of blog commenting).

I've still got work to do to increase the level of connected learning, both in my classrooms and across our two campuses in general.  Question 1. above is partially answered, but that leaves the second and third to address.  I believe that all schools can empower connected learning, and, to my mind, we have to accomplish it through leading by example.  We can't simply tell faculty what to do or even how to do it, but rather show them why connected learning through PLNs is important with clear examples of it.  Am I wrong to think that connected learning starts from the ground and spreads up, revealing that it's the students and teachers who spread support effective PLNs instead of the institution itself?  We've just got to find creative ways of inspiring students to engage with the PLN, and I'm excited to continue to experiment with blogs and discover new ways to accomplish this.