The new professional - in education

A new definition of professional behavior is developing in this social world. Here is the transition:

from What Does “Professional” Look Like Today? by Allison Fine (via Stephen's Lighthouse.)

While Fine is writing about business CEOs, I am struck by how each of these things applies to those of us in education - classroom teachers, librarians, principals, tech directors and superintendents alike - with the new need for transparency driven by the forces of social media.

While our conversations so often deal with being cautious in our use of Facebook, friending students, and questioning social networking's education value, the ground is shifting.

As I was looking at Fine's list, I thought about two of our district's most popular and effective elementary teachers - Arne and Steve. These guys have long been Civil War reenactors (Arne briefly appears in Dances with Wolves) who have shared their interest and passion for the era with students through a Civil War camp, presentations and a variety of instructional activities. Rather than hiding their personal interests, they've used them to make themselves more effective teachers.

Social media is allowing all educators, teachers and librarians included, to share their personal passions and make themselves "more interesting and attractive." 

What interests you that makes you more interesting in turn? Gardening? Bicycling? Genealogy? Fishing? A particular literary genre? Scrapbooking? Travel? It's time to stop hiding these interests and start sharing them if you aren't already. What does your website, Facebook page, blog, and LinkedIn profile say to your parents, students and potential employers?

Tell us a little about yourself. It's part of being a "new" professional. 

Should students have hackable devices?

Apple shipped 67 million iPads in just 2 years after the product launched. It took 24 years to sell that many Macs, 5 years for that many iPods, and over 3 years for that many iPhones. [Source: Forbes]

In response to  Why iPads II, my old friend Peter Rock left a comment about this paragraph from the post:

Say what you want about "proprietary" applications and Apple uber-control over what runs on the devices, the damn things just work. I don't think I've had to trouble shoot my iPad (and I have the first model).

Peter writes:

There's a lot to be said in terms of the educational value between proprietary (why the scare quotes?) and free/open source applications/operating systems. There's also a lot to be said in terms of the educational value of having the freedom to choose what one will run or not run on one's own device. There's also a lot to be said in terms of the educational value of actually doing some troubleshooting instead of seeing it as an obstacle to learning.

Personally, I think every student should have a machine they can hack. Until they do, trying to get an iThing in their hands represents a backward set of values. Hackable hardware and an Internet connection should be the goal.

Peter's comment, for some reason, got me to thinking about the cars I drove in high school and college: a '63 Corvair, a '54 Chevy BelAire, and a '59 Rambler station wagon. If I remember I paid, respectively, $400, $100 and $50 for these vehicles. And whether I liked it or not, I got plenty of chances to troubleshoot these vehicles. I will admit that the experiences -  climbing under an old car in junk yard to find a replacement part, skinning my knuckles loosening recalcitrant bolts, and sitting at home or bumming rides instead of out driving to a dance or party - have colored my thinking about the do-it-yourself approach to any technology. How often I wished I just had a car that would reliably get me from point A to point B. And having a computer that just lets me do what I need to get done reliably - research, communicate, edit, or whatever - is my kind of machine. 

"Hackable hardware and an Internet connection should be the goal," Peter writes. Is customizing one's computing environment a skill everyone needs? Or is it a distraction that gets in the way of teaching more important skills like communications and information literacy? I guess I know the emphasis I'd like my teachers to place on computer use with my grandsons.

Related to Peter's objections are Gary Stager's in his long and thoughtful reply to the Why iPads II post. One of the power uses that he has kids doing with laptops that cannot be accomplished with iPad is programming. He writes:

These constraints [Apple's limiitations on customizing the iOS and apps]  make impossible all of the "knowledge work" I did with kids this week. 3rd graders used formal mathematical language and turtle geometry to create beautiful art, 4th graders built and programmed robotic stuffed animals. 5th graders programmed their own video games while learning complex math, science and computer science concepts, while some classmates figured out how to program the computer to represent any fraction as shaded regions of a circle.

If you a follower of Seymour Papert, this argument needs to be considered. In the hands of the right teacher with a genuine constructivist mindset, with gobs of time and no expectations of student performance on tests, this is indeed a powerful means of teaching. If the kinds of activities Gary describes are common and expected practice in your school, iPads are not the device for you - or at least not the best devices.

But whether Gary likes it or not, Papert's ideology is not mainstream practice in any U.S. school I know. (Not saying it shouldn't be, it just isn't.) If we go back to auto analogy, schools are more focused on helping kids use a car to get from one place to another (driver's ed) rather than design and fix the cars themselves (auto shop). Our district and state)asks for kids who are doing genuine research, writing stories and essays, creating mult-media visuals, accessing and reading high-interest materials, and who are using games to increase their skills and content understandings. When these are the goals, hackability become a distraction.

What Peter's and Gary's comments made me think about was just how critical identifying educational goals are when selecting devices - a task that too few school planners undertake.  Start with the task, not with the tool.

Yeah, duh. I know.

Image source

From A. Churches: Some Libraries Still Have Got It Wrong…

Andrew Churches is one of the smartest Kiwis I know. (But I admit I don't know that many.) I also know from going souvenir shopping with him in Mumbai, he is a sharp bargainer. His Educational Origami blog is brilliant and you should add it to your feed reader. 

Please read his post Some libraries still have got it wrong. 

The point Andrew makes is that librarians isolate themselves behind desks (and I would add in offices) rather than being out in the area with those they serve.

I've always wondered just how differently school librarians would be perceived if everyone put his/her desk on the floor of the library, turned the librarian's office into conference room, and chopped about two feet off the height of the circulation desk. As a school librarian at all grade levels, the first thing I always did was move my desk on to the floor. 

Did kids and teacher come up and "interrupt" me by asking questions or just saying hello.

Yes. But that's the point.

Get out of the office. Get our from behind the circulation desk fortress.