We have been programmed to assume that what kids are taught at school is better knowledge than what they get by connecting to the internet. We are also assured that schools standardize subjects so each youngster will learn the same material — at least at a minimum.
For both of these supposed articles of faith for schooling, the opposite has become true — sometimes radically so. Yesterday the Minneapolis-St. Paul StarTribune published a column by Katherine Kersten describing a legal “battle royal” regarding a public charter school TiZA where the enrollment is mainly Somali.
We can suppose — because TiZA is a taxpayer supported public school — students will go through preparations for and taking required standards tests. But it is hard to assume that the students would not learn a lot of the material they study from the perspective of Islam. After all, their Somali parents would see that as a benefit — as a chief reason for sending their children to TiZA. The StarTribune columnist writes: “During her tenure, [a witness] says in an affidavit, she saw ‘no real distinction’ between the operations of TiZA and the Muslim American Society, with which the school shares a building.”
Schooling has always involved culture and nurture. To what extent that is good or bad is not the subject of this blog and website. Visualizing schooling as a pizza focuses thinking about the knowledge-acquiring aspect of schooling. Until recently the level where the issue of knowledge biases and slants was struggled with was among the pepperoni and onions in the above illustration: curriculum, textbooks, and what is in the library.
Handschooling is a brand-new doable step that absolutely equalizes and vastly expands the knowledge available for students — worldwide, no less — to study and learn literally from the same webpage.
To add the olives layer by providing each TiZA student with his and her own mobile web browser would not need to change any of the other layers. It would add, for each individual student, a connection to the new layer that no other generation has ever had: the global knowledge commons that emerges in the intertwingularity.
It is false to justify not letting kids have handschooling because it would be substituting the olives for the pepperoni and onions. But forbidding the olives is increasingly less possible. The world has changed for school people who would limit to their own biases what children learn. The new intertwingularity layer hovers above every school, and increasingly the new generation is connecting on its own.
Open educational resources (OER for short among advocates of open online educational resources) is made up several layers of construction. The image of the pizza suggests this overall structure with these layers, from the bottom up: subject matter, designing of the subject stuff into a webpage, coding that design and content with the browser languages, establishing links among related webpages, and platforming all of that on the internet of wires, glass, and wireless signals that network, as it were, in the global ether. Yet there is more — wonderfully more.
The critical and marvelous layer hovers dynamically, invisibly, virtually at the top of the OER pizza. It is the layer where everything intertwingles. It is not there physically. Its substance is ideas.
What could I possibly mean? Let me give you an example. As I write this it is just past 4PM in New York City. That is the hour that the tsunami set off this morning by the earthquake in Chili is expected to reach the beaches of Hawaii. Thousands upon thousands of pieces of information are being sent into the internet and intertwingling there. They are connecting, forming hubs, attaching new facts, verifying warnings, and on and on. Here is a screenshot of what FoxNews.com is pushing into the intertwingularity at 4PM.
The global knowledge commons, which is the future of OER, is emergent into the intertwingularity as a dynamic network of what is known by humankind. Added to the commons from today’s tsunami will be new knowledge now flowing in and being vetted dynamically. In the FoxNews list, for example, is “Send Your Photos.” This citizen journalism will add to our planet’s record of today’s earthquake and tsunami. Arising from many individual inputs, images will be intertwingled through vetting by editors and online clicks. Some of them will find their way into permanent collections, as order arises from today’s tsunami of input into the intertwingularity.
We are only beginning to understand the wonders of this new medium of what we know as a species. There is no question, however, about this: The freshest, most authentic, and complete repository of what is known by humankind is now openly online. In the open virtual intertwingularity this content interacts freely to emerge new and vetted knowledge. Mobile browsers make it possible to put the emerging global knowledge commons into the hands of every student. We can and should be working to make knowledge in the commons more findable. We should be reconfiguring education around the new location of of what is known by humankind.
I kick the walls when I see billions of dollars gushing toward limiting learning to low standards taught and tested in unequal schools. With handschooling — switching food metaphors — we provide the whole enchilada of knowledge to every student by connecting each one to the intertwingularity.
The Obama “Race to the Top” program will send billions of taxpayer dollars through the federal government back down to states and districts. There will be strings attached. Really racing to the top will be control of education.
“Obama strengthens black schools” is the headline for Politico’s story today that includes the above video and links to the executive order. Since that order is a pdf, making the text an effort open, I have copied the full text of the executive order on a webpage with a link to the pdf. I do so hoping it will help get people to look at it with some care. Just because it is about black education, does not mean it is good for black education. My opinion is that this executive order further federalizes control of schools — particularly black schools. It is nannyism that holds back individual black kids by allegedly coming to their rescue because they are black.
My opinion here is qualified by having been there and seen it done:
My own public education was at segregated schools in Texas. In 2nd-4th grades I was enrolled in the white school at Bastrop — a small East Texas town which also had a school for Negroes and a school for Mexicans. El Paso, where I spent 5-12, had a small Negro population, whose children were sent by law to their own school. A Borderlands article gives this history: “Douglass School Served Black Community Well.” I graduated from El Paso’s Austin High School in May 1954, the month the US Supreme Court ruled segregation unconstitutional. I remember my Mother’s concern at the time for the black kids, saying: “There won’t be the Negro football leagues any more, or a Negro girl winning beauty queen.” In the same vein, Borderlands includes this:
According to Arnold Williams, currently a biology teacher for the Socorro Independent School District, when Douglass closed, “Many students were upset at the fact they had to leave… They got used to the idea of being isolated from almost everything in society. They felt like a big part of their life was being shut out and a new door was opening.” Williams says some students were intimidated by society and the new surroundings, for Douglass had always been their home.
These things were thought and said a half a century ago. Today black beauty queens abound and many sports heroes are black guys. El Paso was to play a key role in ending sports segregation in 1966 — a story told by the recent movie Glory Road and which I blogged about when the movie was released.
In the present time, handschooling is a new big step to individualizing learning. The mobile a student uses does know or care about the race of its user. At the global online knowledge commons everybody studies from the same webpage, in an equality more pure than even the most visionary person could have hoped for in 1954.
My Mother was an individualist. I recall her teaching me in the setting of Bastrop that racial discrimination is simply wrong. The Bastrop setting in 1942-46 featured a white nannyism. We lived in a large and comfortable home near the edge of the center of town where only whites lived. Just a couple of blocks north of our house the small shacks where the Negroes lived began. I recall watching one day as the all-white volunteer Bastrop Fire Department rushed past our house. I looked on from the distance of our front yard as the white volunteers put out the fire that was burning one of the shacks, while the Negroes watched.
NEVER should we allow an African-American to be put in the position of those who were neither expected to nor knew how to put out the fire I saw in Bastrop. I may never get another reader for Handschooling.com, but I will say here: The Obama executive order yesterday is sending the federal government to put out presumed fires and thereby demeaning everyone involved in the HBCU. This move is akin to resuscitating Douglass School in 2010 and making it dependent on federal agencies. What follows is language from the executive order itself. I have left in cosmetic references to private sector inclusion, but clearly this is a federally controlled project with the central goal of nannying the historic black colleges and universities — of putting our their fires:
Here are excerpts from the federal nanny take-over provisions of the executive order: (more…)
These days “photoshopped” is used as a verb for changing an image. If you have wondered how images are manipulated in Photoshop, the Lynda.com video above will give you the general idea.
Educators would not go wrong to use Lynda’s story and online teaching methods as excellent models and methodology. I attended a class by Lynda perhaps ten years ago when she was giving seminars for Apple. I have been to a lot of seminars, but Lynda’s stands out in my memory. She is a gifted teacher. About five years ago I had some discussions with Lynda at one of the Flashforward events she was co-sponsoring. She told me that what she liked and wanted to do was to teach. At that point she was deciding to spend her energy making Lynda.com a source for teaching. She has succeeded admirably in doing that.
I say all of this about Lynda because she has been down the paths educators are entering toward effective topic teaching online. She has organized a stable of excellent software teachers and provided the studio and technology for them to teach what they know on the training videos produced at Lynda.com. The video posted above is a prime example.
Lynda Weinman and her husband and business partner Bruce Heavin tell the story of their partnership and company in The lynda.com Story. They refer to their enterprise as the “Online Training Library.” Most of the videos in the Library are only available to paying subscribers. It will be very interesting to follow what Lynda.com does in the future about opening content. Already more than 5000 of her videos are free. My guess is Lynda will lead us with her usual intelligence and learner-centered passion into workable openness for the global knowledge commons.
Back in the 1980s, Wendy’s ran its famous “Where’s the beef?” ads. At some point the abundance of internet knowledge is going to force the same question to be asked out loud about the beef in school standards. To get the idea, here is a comparison you can make:
Click around a bit in the Wolfram network of mathematical explanations and demonstrations — all linked together by their cognitive relationships. You will find Sirloin, flank steak, hamburger — and every math beef cut and preparation imaginable.
The strong echo continues in schools and across the world of what Jonathan Kozol indelibly named savage inequalities. The mobile window opens a global commons that is the same for each and oblivious to who is visiting it to learn.
We have been programmed to assume that what kids are taught at school is better knowledge than what they get by connecting to the internet. We are also assured that schools standardize subjects so each youngster will learn the same material — at least at a minimum.
To add the olives layer by providing each TiZA student with his and her own mobile web browser would not need to change any of the other layers. It would add, for each individual student, a connection to the new layer that no other generation has ever had: the global knowledge commons that emerges in the intertwingularity.
