Fred Johnson links to my blog in his new blog “Stemwinder” (love the name). I’m gratified; I go to the blog; I read it; I look for the profile, of course; and like Alice confronted by her comestibles, I obey the implicit command in the “my web page” link and, well, click. Now I find a cabinet of wonders: a fascinating website full of interesting images that are just clever enough (not too clever by half), and a link to a blogroll featuring Fred’s students this term. They’re all blogging. I click on one. The writing is interesting, the prompts are clever, and the mental link to the “Phantom Professor on Voice” blog I just read (by following another of Fred’s links) starts to spark up interesting connections, like the one between a tortilla chip and the perfect strawberry cobbler cookie, as detailed by Malcolm Gladwell in the recent food edition of the New Yorker (blogged about in another context by Jon Udell).

I do not have time to read everything right now. I do have time to put Stemwinder and Phantom Professor on my Bloglines blogroll. All that said, here’s the heart of it, right now, for me: these links (traces of human attention and creativity that they are) encourage me and keep me pressing forward. Always time well spent when I get a bit of that good advice.

NB: don’t miss Fred’s Tell-A-Vision.

Over at Pedablogy, Steve Greenlaw reflects on the end of week two of his experiment in a thoroughly (aggressively? persistently? recurrently?) metacognitive classroom. I’m interested to see that Steve’s exceptionally thoughtful account ends with a student telling him “now I know what you’re looking for.”

My first thought is, “what else would any teacher be looking for?” Identifying major concepts, distinguishing them from minor concepts, and applying either or both to new contexts: these are real school skills of the highest order and greatest importance. My second thought is that the comment typifies intellectual laziness and a kind of cynical cost-benefit analysis, viz., “I’m not trying to get an education here; I’m trying to suss out the teacher’s expectations and take the path of least resistance to meeting them.” My third thought is that it’s an honest question, and that enough teachers (for whatever reasons) don’t ask for metacognition that students are genuinely puzzled about the “rules of engagement” when one teacher does.

Perhaps the truth is some combination of all three thoughts.

I’m still haunted by Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” in this regard: to say what you’re looking for (which I distinguish to some extent from clarifying the assignment, which is what Steve did) is to guarantee the student cannot find it. It’s interesting that institutionalized education hides this fact from itself, or seems to. Or maybe (probably!) I’m just being willful to say to students, “I’m looking for you to show me something I didn’t know I was looking for.” The catalyst for student discovery can be a lecture, an aside, a moment’s discussion outside class, an email, a clipping, a cartoon. In short, real school is built on such catalysis (footnote here to my IT boss, Chip German), and such catalysis can appear anywhere at any time. The trick is to surround students with sense, or potential sense, and to strengthen them with a persistent feeling of expectation, and with the tools of preparedness.

Steve’s obviously doing that, and in that way his “experiment” feels more like a reaffirmation to me. You go, Dr. Greenlaw.

EDIT: Konrad Glogowski’s aptly named “Blog of Proximal Development” also treats these issues here. I continue to wish for a stimulating synthesis of a) pylons and b) the thrill of the run. Seems to me a curriculum ought to have both (and will need both). Tennis, with a net.

Whoa. Didn’t Bryan Alexander blog about this recently? Or did I dream he did?

There’s so much inspiration and wonder in what Will Richardson does in his job, and generously shares with us on Weblogg-ed, that it feels a little odd to single out one thing. But this little treasure is so compelling that I want to try to explain a little bit of its power over my imagination just now.

Thirty-three teachers at Will’s school are piloting the use of Tablet PCs in their classrooms. I won’t outline the project here for fear that I’ll get the details wrong; consult Will’s blog for more information. I do gather that they’ve got a wireless environment and that they can connect easily to video projectors. So far, so good. What jazzed me this morning, though, is the screencast Will put together to congratulate his teachers on their use of the devices. How did it jazz me? Let me count the ways:

1. The congratulations uses the medium he congratulates them for using, and thus becomes yet another proof-of-concept. That’s elegant, imaginative, and shrewd: a hat trick.
2. As Jon Udell has argued, screencasts can be very compelling mini-narratives. Will’s a fine storyteller, and that makes the screencast very effective. And by drawing on the tablet as he tells his story, he channels Magic Drawing Board, a favorite of mine from Captain Kangaroo (everything I know I learned from the Captain). The writing becomes a kind of animation. The result is an interesting combination of cartoon and manuscript. Imagine opening a letter in which the message writes itself, in the writer’s own script, as you read it. Perhaps the analogue I’m stumbling toward is that of the voice. Just as what I call the “explaining voice” conveys meaning and dramatizes cognition in the microcues of its own unfolding in time (an expressiveness like that of a musical performance), so the tablet writing in this screencast conveys meaning and dramatizes cognition. I’m reminded that “witness” means both spectator and knowledge. The trick is to get the spectacle right, to convey simultaneously the information and the mind’s experience of the information, and Will does this beautifully. (It is in fact a natural thing to do, but one that institutional education finds difficult to scale or sustain. Easier to ask for reports than for these layered performances of seeking-after-understanding.)
3. Did I say already that the presentation was creative? The awards are funny, well-chosen, and easily recognizable from my own experience in the classroom. I see the classroom vividly, in my mind’s eye. I also see Will there, looking on. Will also has a good speaking voice which he uses well in his voice-over. There’s a sneaky emphasis on production values here, all the more effective because the presentation looks utterly extemporaneous. Perhaps it was, and that’s all the more impressive.
4. Now, imagine an annotated bibliography in which a student narrates her research and comments on her sources in a screencast using a tablet PC. She writes notes, uses graphics, whatever, as she talks about what she thinks about what she’s read. The screencast is then shared with the class asynchronously. What’s happened? Not a gain in efficiency: a standard annotated bibliography can be “consumed” (hate that word) more quickly, and no doubt constructed more quickly as well. But the screencast could well be more effective as a learning tool. The drama of cognition and metacognition for both the researcher and her fellow students is amplified, individuated, and perhaps (uh-oh) made more enjoyable. The explosion of social networking as a cornerstone of Web 2.0 should lead us toward more such tools and media of presence. (An explosive cornerstone: what a weird mixed metaphor. Can a rocket be a building?)

Or so it seems to me this morning. I’m beginning to think the idea of the haptic may be worth exploring in this context. The intimate tool that extends capabilities in a way that feels like an extension of one’s presence in the world. Reach and grasp that establish new baselines from which the next reach-and-grasp will occur. The haptic sense makes the thing grasped into the tool for the next reach, because it doesn’t feel like a tool anymore. I’m not using “haptic” to mean simulating touch. I’m using it as a metaphor to investigate the cognitive metaphors of apprehension and comprehension.The former ties in to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, the latter into the newly-bootstrapped level above which the ZPD reappears. I’m interesting in this metaphor because its kinetic implications include the idea of use, where “I see,” also of course a compelling metaphor for learning, doesn’t fully activate that idea. I see what is shown to me. I use what I grasp. Or something like that.

Thanks, Will. Again.

EDIT: This tablet PC screencast, though thoughtfully presented on the author’s blog, doesn’t work nearly so well, for reasons I’m still mulling over.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (2.5MB)

As my preceding posts relate, I’ve been listening to a series of podcasts originating from Dr. Kelly Blanchard’s Introduction to Principles of Economics class at Purdue University. I am intrigued by the concepts I am hearing about. Some of the concepts I do claim to be learning about as well, though at a casual level that would not survive even the gentle rigors of an early quiz. Is anything of value happening, beyond the salutary spectacle of a fool rushing in where experts (newly warned by my example) would not dare to tread?

I think so, obviously, but I also need to clarify that thought.

I claim no rigorous learning from my little podcast-and-blog experiment. I claim absolutely no expertise in the subject whatsoever. I’ve never undertaken a course of study in economics. I am, however, intrigued by the concepts I’m hearing about. (Bears repeating.) I am learning some things, if only some terminology, and understanding a few of those things dimly enough to keep stumbling on, to realize the potential value of this way of looking at the world, to want to ask questions, to want to be in conversation. I blog about my experience to create a beginning learner’s diary seasoned by the more sophisticated reflections of a putative expert in one field who is most assuredly non-expert in this field.

It is disappointing but perhaps should not be surprising to learn of experts who have resolved, on the basis of the mistakes I’ve recorded here without editing away the traces (of the ones I’ve caught, anyway), never to try such an experiment themselves by blogging on, say, a Milton studies podcast. Too much risk of public blundering.

That’s a shame. I’m always up for a conversation about Milton.