Making is learning. Remember John Dewey’s phrase “learn by doing.” It’s a hundred-year-old educational philosophy based on experiential learning that seems forgotten, if not forbidden, today. I see a huge opportunity to change the nature of our educational system.

I’ve been a growing supporter of the Maker movement over the past couple of years and I hope that it’s starting to pick up steam in some places in American culture. At least it then has a chance to seep into schools.

I’ve always felt that EdTech is too screen-based and that the EdTech community needs to do better melding with the arts, science, math and technology (TechEd). The good news is that there are real and doable opportunities for schools and teachers to do just this within the Maker/DIY movement. Today.

The most important thing I have learned the past six years is that there’s so much more to educational technology than the Web 2.0, interactive whiteboards and video games. I think this movement Illustrates what I’ve believed for leathers for some time now, that they be active and, not only engaged, but empowered through concrete, yet meaningful learning experiences.

Let them Soar!

To best experience this Flickr slideshow, click full screen (lower right) and select the option to “always show title and description” (upper right). These principles are from Some Reflections on Designing Construction Kits for Kids by Brian Silverman and Mitch Resnick.

I was taught to question.

Lately, Twitter is failing me. Today I had an exchange on Twitter where I put this to practice in my own community of practice. While the exchange was hardly equivalent to the research mentioned above, I had a question in regards to the practice of creating fake Facebook walls for historical/fictional characters. I didn’t “get it”. I questioned it. I stated it seemed contrived and also seemed like an online worksheet. I also asked what was next… what action/learning experience follows the creation of and discussion around a “fakebook” profile?

I wanted to know.

Back to my mention of peer-reviewed research. I believe a community of practice (made up of peers in a practice) should allow this line of questioning in whatever spaces are available/used. I respect those that were posting the information, they’ve taught/shared a thing or two with me before. Because of this I felt comfortable tweeting my questions. Apparently it was not welcomed and received as me merely liking to argue. Nothing could be further from the truth. You can imagine my disappointment.

I claim no expertise in any niche or corner of education or the EdTech community of practice. What I do claim is the right to question, as a participant in a community of practice and for the benefit of those in the community and those I work with/for, the content that is posted within the community. Since we are striving to teach our students that posting on the Internet results in feedback and critical questioning, I think we would do well to remember this as we post there as well. I certainly try to. If I don’t, it is your right to call me on it.

Being taught to question was one of the most important and powerful lessons I will always remember. It has served me well and will continue to do so.

I will still question. You should too.

Your imagination is real. | Indexed.

One of my favorite webcomics/blogs is the simple presentation and complex thinking of Indexed. The first comment is equally insightful…

“To be fair, there’s probably a sector at least twice as large as A for “people that have been wrongly told that they are”.  ~ Paul B.”

“I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities. I think that the examples I have  given of learning in a computational environment provide a glimpse of a context for learning in which socialization would be based on a potentiation of the individual, an empowering sense of one’s own ability to learn anything one wants to know, conditioned by deep understanding of how these abilities are amplified by belonging to cultures and communities.”

Papert, S. (1982) Tomorrow’s Classrooms?. In Times Educational Supplement March 5, 1982 (pp. 31-32,41)

I think these words reveal how we can start to use technology to help us think, not just different, but deeper about what real learning looks like.  They also provide a guiding light that schools can use to navigate along a path of teaching and learning that is more meaningful and valuable for everyone involved.

What we need is visionary people who step out of the ordinary and lead with their heads, hearts and hands (Lehmann, 200?). For examples of Papert’s thinking and learning click through to his work.  Don’t take it for face value (i.e. – just programming), dig deep and think about the learning process and ask yourself how it might look in other contexts.

Fun from the top by Anderson Silva (via Flickr)

I’m slated to conduct a session at EduCon 2.3 next weekend titled Sharing the Joy. During the time that the RFP was open I was really down about the state of education and where it seems to be headed in our country. How could one not be, right? While things were (and still are) being painted publicly as being so bad in schools, I wondered how teachers and students make it through the days, weeks and semesters together? So, it gave me an idea to lead a discussion around sharing what makes teaching and learning enjoyable. Simple, really. There are so many wonderful teachers around that surely a group of them can assemble at EduCon and share how they bring about joy in school. How to bring about joy in school? Now, that’s something I hope you’ll want to write home about.

Here’s the description (subject to edits):

We know that student enjoyment of school leads to better student learning. Through conversation and sharing of experiences, environments and communities of learning we will uncover the strategies and dispositions of teaching and learning that make school enjoyable and meaningful for all.

Since EduCon is about educational conversation here is my, initital, conversational practice (subject to other ideas):

Collaborative documentation in a yet-to-be-determined collaborative space online will be used to guide and capture the learning from this session. Attitudes, mindsets, dispositions, strategies necessary for creating experiences, environments and communities for enjoyable learning will be shared and captured.

There’s no rule that we can’t start now, so I wonder…

• What was your life like as a student?
• What do you bring to teaching that makes learning enjoyable in your class?
• How and what do you celebrate with students? Teachers?

I’d be thrilled if you can make it in some way, shape or form.

This is hardly Earth shattering, though, at the same time, there is so much right and so much wrong with this exchange. These students clearly enjoyed learning at the National Museum of Play, but it felt a whole lot different from what they are accustomed to.

During a time when it seems that children are liking school less and less, do we really feel as though the only way for them to succeed is to coerse them to develop a work ethic?   Professor Mary Jane Treacy suggests we meld of the dichotomy between work and play:

I think we really have to break that dichotomy of play and work, so if you’re a student and you go and you work at your classes and play is something that you do afterwards. And I really think that that’s a false dichotomy and we need to change that, so I’m gonna have to bring those together. We first have to do that among ourselves, the faculty.

What if that so called work ethic we so desire in schools was actually a play ethic?  What if the process of playing developed the very habits, tendencies and dispositions that we wish to invoke through a forced “work ethic”?

What if we really believed that “play is our brain’s favorite way of learning”?