why we learn

I came away from BLC 2008 with two notions of interest. One applies to procedural or systematic change and the other is more personal in nature. As I’ve stated in my previous posts, it seems that the presenters at this conference were a more progressive bunch as a whole, compared to those that I saw at ETech. It was also my sense that the overall level of knowledge was a little higher, and in general, the content was more theoretical in nature. My first take away is the idea that incremental change can be harmful. This wasn’t explicitly stated by any of the presenters, rather it sort of emerged from a synthesis of their disparate presentations. It seems that one of themes running through what I saw was the idea that technology should be viewed as a tool or a support for a new paradigm, new pedagogy if you will. My summation is that incremental change lends itself to assimilation and/or accommodation rather than transformation. That is to say that if we try to change our school “one step at a time” we may well end up with teachers using new technology as a replacement for old technology. More profound is the notion that at the end of this process we will have lost an opportunity to create real change. I think if you look at school reforms of the day, and the ways in which most new technology is used, you will find data that supports this postulate.

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I’m attending the Building Learning Communities 2008 conference for the next couple of days. Ewan Mcintosh kicked off the event with his keynote address this morning. I found his presentation was useful in that it initiated a change in they way I look at my use of technology as a personal tool. Specifically, to this point I have shunned the use of popular sites such as Twitter, del.icio.us, and social networking sites such as Facebook. The reason? I have software that allows me to do the same sort of things on my own using my own web space.

And, suddenly I feel out of place, as though I’ve been complacent in using these tools for too long and I’ve not got work to do immersing myself in this new way of sharing this information. That is to say that I haven’t been participating or sharing, but documenting. The great lesson I take away from this experience is that there is no down time, there is only the continual assimilation and accommodation of new information, new technologies, and the ways in which they are utilized by the younger generations.

Maxine Greene’s piece¹ is one of the more challenging essays, in terms of verbosity and ideas, that I’ve read. Typically, when I consume something this dense, I spend a day or two away from it before I once more review the contents and begin to pull together something that resembles coherent thought. I have done so with this piece. I take a risk here, as it would be safer to acquiesce, but I cannot.

So much of what the author advances resonates, as she meanders through history, tracing philosophical approaches to knowledge, and its pursuit. I subscribe to her underlying postulate regarding the nature of “truth”, specifically the interpretability and relative nature of truth. Moreover, the way in which Greene elucidates these intrinsic qualities, citing the preeminent philosophers of of the past, is particularly helpful. Finally, the way in which she, after what I describe below as a bit of a diatribe, comes back to the terms “imagination” and “metaphor”, relieves a modicum of tension. More importantly, this return to the center also provides the reader with some direction in terms of what might be a way to bridge the divide the author seems set on exacerbating throughout much of this work.

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I have done extensive tweaking to my workflow in terms of reading and writing for the program. Although most everyone uses Microsoft products, maybe my setup will be of some interest.

The technologies that I use are,

• BibDesk
• Skim
• VoodooPad
• LaTeX
• TextMate.

BibDesk, Skim, and LaTeX are free (open-source), the other two cost around $80.00 combined. BibDesk is a reference manager, much like EndNote, but is specific to the BibTex format (more about this later). One BibDesk file stores reference information about every article on my hard drive. The most important piece of information is a “cite-key”, or a unique identifier that is used by BibDesk, BibTex, and later, LaTeX when writing. Each downloaded article is saved in a folder corresponding to its year of publication within a parent directory entitled “Papers”. BibDesk also allows for the searching of articles and the categorizing by keyword. (Many downloaded RIS files include keyword information provided by authors.)

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I’ve just finished reading Learning Together by Barbara Rogoff, Carolyn Goodman Turkanis, and Leslee Bartlett. I purchased this book only because it was very cheap and written by an author (Rogoff) who wrote the book that I had actually set out to buy, Apprenticeship In Thinking. Fortunately, sent out Learning Together a couple of days before Apprenticeship In Thinking, which forced me to read it first. I’m very happy I did.

Learning Together is a compilation of the thoughts of various members of an “open school” with a rather long history located in Utah. Current and former parents, administrators, students and teachers take turns chronicling their experiences at the school. Collectively, the contributors’ words crystallize the potential power of democratically collaborative schools, yet they also honestly address the arduousness of approaching education in this way. The schools’ philosophy is summarized as

instruction that builds on children’s interests in a collaborative way, where learning activities are planned by children as well as adults and adults learn from their own involvement as they help children learn (p. 3).

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