Who You Gonna Trust?

There is an old Richard Pryor routine in which a woman catches her husband in bed with another woman. The husband’s quick response is “Who you gonna trust – me or your lying eyes?”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about determining the authority of information. It’s the fault of Tim Wilson, Technology Director for the Hopkins (MN) schools, and the owner of The Savvy Technologist blog. During a workshop he gave at our MEMO conference last weekend, a collective gasp of horror rose from the throats of many librarians when they heard him explain that Wikipedia gets its content through reader/user contributions, rather than established “authorities.”

Joyce Valenza in her Never Ending Search blog entry, Something Wiki this way comes , examines the Wikipedia phenomena, interviews its creator Jimmy Wales and offers some thoughtful insight on guidelines for student use. (Read it!)

Authority is an interesting concept and one we probably don’t think hard enough about ourselves as professionals. I have to say, I am growing less enamored of traditional “authorities” all the time and depend more on the “lying eyes” of folks with real world experience about the things I investigate.

This started when looking at a recommendation for resort to stay at in Mexico one Winter break. When I could find little about resorts in the “authoritative” sources like Fodors and Frommers, I turned to the web and chanced upon TripAdvisor.com, a site that features reviews of hotels written by people who have actually stayed in them. There are half a dozen or more reviews of any one place. This often have a range of opinions and experiences, but interestingly also some sort of consensus about service, cleanliness, and value. And the reviews tend to be current. My experience has been that TripAdvisor does a good job of estimating the size of cockroaches one might expect to find. (Uh, much to the Luckiest Woman in the World’s dismay, we rarely go 4-star.)

I’m finding I trust book reviews on Amazon rather than those in the newspaper. I read lots of user reviews of technology when I last purchased a digital camera. Increasingly it seems, the views of average schmucks whose tastes and abilities are closer to mine more valuable than the professional geeks, gurus, and critics.

This has been bleeding over into professional practice as well. In a number of areas, so-called “best practice” seems to be directly at odds with the views of practitioners. The reading experts are not fond of Accelerated Reader, but librarians and classroom teachers often love it. AASL despises “fixed” schedules, but those in such schedules write to me en mass defending the arrangement. There is often a disconnect between the purists at ACLU and those who face privacy issues in schools. (The ACLU cannot seem to bring itself to acknowledge the custodial responsibilities of educators.) What often sounds so good in theory, is often quite different in practice.

So back to Wikipedia. Do we trust it or not? Should we allow kids to use it or not? Quite honestly, I am still thinking about it and will probably double-check the information I might find there into the foreseeable future with another source or two.

Joyce offers the following:

In the face of information glut, we are faced with new decisions about the very nature of knowledge and authority. When does it make sense to use Wikipedia, other wiki projects, and blogs as information sources? When might it be best to use other sources? What do your teachers expect in terms of authority in a bibliography? How do the edit histories reflect the quality of the articles?

Pretty good questions. How do you guide your students?

Revisiting Pink and “Conceptual Age” Skills

A Saturday Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. The original post from October 4, 2005.

In my August 22, 2005 blog entry, I did a short review of Daniel Pink’s new book A Whole New Mind in which he lists six right brain “senses” he believes successful workers in a post-information age economy will need to have.

Pink’s “senses” (DESIGN, STORY, SYMPHONY, EMPATHY, PLAY, and MEANING) were on my mind this weekend when working on a “serious” paper for the National Library Board of Singapore conference*. The topic is “The Knowledge Worker Redux” and it was a great chance to reflect on what skills our students need to successfully compete in a global economy.

First, I am going to be bold and add a seventh “sense” of my own to Mr. Pink’s list:

7. Not just knowledge, but also LEARNING. Unless a person develops both the ability and the desire to continue to learn new skills, to be open to new ideas, and to be ready to change practices in the face of new technologies, economic forces, and societal demands, he or she will not be able to successfully compete in a global economy.

In the age of educational accountability, we seem to be gearing all our instructional efforts to helping students master left-brain skills, since that is what tests usually measure. But to what extent do we and should we also be developing design sense, storytelling abilities, the ability to synthesis information, empathy, the use of humor, and the ability to detect the importance of the information learned? How do we create true “life-long learners?” What emphases, using Pink’s model, might schools and libraries wish to cultivate in the “conceptual age” worker?

1. DESIGN

• Offer art classes and activities
• Assess not just content, but appearance of student work
• Teach visual literacy

2. STORY

• Ask for student writing in the narrative voice.
• Teach speaking skills.
• Use storytelling as a part of teaching.
• Give students opportunities to both hear and tell stories.
• Honor digital storytelling as an important communication format.

3. SYMPHONY

• Design classroom projects that cross disciplines.
• Ask for the application of skills and concepts to genuine problems.
• Use inductive learning strategies (learning by doing).

4. EMPATHY

• Emphasize reading literature about people from other cultures and socio-economic groups.
• Give students service learning and volunteer opportunities or requirements.
• Give students the opportunity to take part as an actor in theater productions.
• Design group projects.

5. PLAY

• Teach with games, including computer/online games.
• Teach with simulations.
• Offer a variety of athletics and physical education classes.
• Offer participatory music classes.
• Teach through riddles and jokes, and encourage students to tell them.

6. MEANING

• Offer classes in comparative religion, myth and legend.
• Teach ethical behaviors as a part of every project.
• Asking for writings to include statements of personal values.

7. LEARNING

• Teach processes, not facts.
• Allow students to research areas of personal interest (and tolerate a diversity of interests).
• Give students the ability to learn in non-traditional ways (online, early enrollment in college, apprenticeships).
• Make available clubs and organizations for students to join in which students learn non-academic skills.
• Provide access to a wide range of information sources.

Our society and educational system sadly sees many of the opportunities listed above which develop “conceptual age” skills as “extras” – frills that are often the first to be cut in times of tight budgets. It’s tragically ironic that we are doing a disservice to our students as future workers and citizens by doing so.

Other “conceptual age” skills? Other things schools should be doing to help kids practice those that Pink enumerates?

*The paper went on to appear as an article in Teacher-Librarian magazine.

A Whole New Mind

The “Lazy Person’s Guide to Reading” (see my August 16th blog entry) seems to have paid off once again. I spent an not inordinate amount of time on the porch this weekend finishing Daniel Pink’s wonderful book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. I’d heard Pink on NPR a few weeks back and just had to find out more about what he had to say

For those of us who were terrified by Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat and its report on the rise of outsourcing of white collar jobs to Asia, Pink’s book brings some relief – if not a little optimism for our kids in tomorrow’s workplace – if we as educators take some lessons from it.

Like Friedman, Pink acknowledges the outsourcing trend (Asia), as well as two other trends he labels Abundance and Automation. He suggests that readers ask themselves three questions about their jobs:

1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
2. Can a computer do it faster?
3. Am I offering something that satisfies the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age? (Are you not just making toilet brushes, but toilet brushes that satisfy the user’s aesthetic sensibilities as well?)

As a result of these trends, he believes we are shifting from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. Successful players in this new economy will increasing be required to develop and use the right-brain abilities of high concept (seeing the larger picture, synthesizing information) and high touch (being empathetic, creating meaning). Happy news, perhaps, for those of us who never were all that good at the left-brain stuff in the first place.

More specifically, he suggests we work toward developing in ourselves (and I hope by implication, our students), six right brain “senses,” to complement our left-brain, analytic skills. He suggests we will need realize the value of:
1. Not just function, but also DESIGN
2. Not just argument, but also STORY.
3. Not just focus, but also SYMPHONY.
4. Not just logic, but also EMPATHY.
5. Not just seriousness, but also PLAY.
6. Not just accumulation, but also MEANING.

In the age of educational accountability, we seem to be gearing all our instructional efforts to helping students master left-brain skills, since that is what the tests measure, of course. But to what extent do we and should we also be developing design sense, storytelling abilities, the ability to synthesis information, empathy, the use of humor and the ability to detect the importance of the information they learn?

How have you addressed left-brain skills into your lesson plans?

 Follow-up posting.

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1 Comment »
IF you closely study lessons plans and the trend in education, you will find that 80-90% of school is languge and left-brained based, yet, 80-89% of our students are right-brain learners. There is another book all educatiors should read entitled Is the Left Brain Always Right? An old book, but provides food for thought. Perhaps, as educators we should focus on whole brain and whoe person development?

Comment by Ruth — August 23, 2005 @ 9:48 am