100,000

This blog crossed over the somewhat important 100,000 visits mark on my stats counter early in 2019. That is a nice solid number and I'm happy people have found the blog.

with a really small post about some of the Big Questions - How did the universe begin? How did life begin? Are we alone?

That 100k stat isn't all that impressive as blogs go. In fact, other blogs that I write on have bigger numbers. For example, I write on weekends on an aptly named Weekends in Paradelle, about big and small questions on a more personal level. That site is approaching the 400k mark now. My oldest blog, Serendipity35, which covers education + technology, crossed the 100 million mark a while ago.

But this site was a repurposed blog that I started just to experiment with the Blogger software. It had no theme or purpose and was just about things I noticed around the web. I repurposed it a few years ago with the idea of trying to post short entries that "educate" in some way in lots of different areas. The idea of a one-room schoolhouse came to mind.

One-room schools were once pretty commonplace throughout rural portions of various countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. In these rural and small town schools (some of which literally used someone's house), all of the students met in a single room. A single teacher taught academic basics to different aged children at different  levels of elementary-age boys and girls.

I imagine that younger kids were hearing some of the older kids' lessons and older kids could get remedial lessons when the younger kids were being taught. I think that could be an interesting model of learning. I also think it would be a challenging teaching assignment. It's a topic I delve into a bit deeper on my other blog.

Three Cups of Bitter Tea

I read an amazing and uplifting adventure story of survival that leads to a humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism. It is the story of Greg Mortenson, a mountaineer who makes a 1993 climb of Pakistan’s treacherous K2. After, he has an encounter with impoverished mountain villagers in Taliban territory who nurse him back to health, and promises to build them a school.

Over the next decade he builds 55 schools. He focuses on ones for girls. Education in one of the most isolated and dangerous regions on earth.

The book is Three Cups of Tea  which chronicles Mortenson’s quest. It sounds like a noble mission, but it brought him into conflict with both Islamists and Americans.

The book's title was inspired by a saying Haji Ali shared with Mortenson: "The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family..."

I read it in 2007 and it was inspiring. It is hopeful. It became a bestseller.

But then in 2011, there were challenges of the book and allegations about Mortenson.

Author Jon Krakauer is an author I admire. He wrote Into the Wild, another adventure story that ends in tragedy that is one of my favorite non-fiction books. he wrote Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster.

Krakauer alleges that a number of Mortenson's claims in the book are fictitious. He accuses him of mismanaging funds meant for the schools.

Is Greg Mortenson a selfless humanitarian and children’s crusader? Is the person who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize?

Krakauer interviews former employees, board members, and others who have intimate knowledge of Mortenson and his charity, the Central Asia Institute.

Krakauer publishes Three Cups of Deceit and unravels Mortenson's story. He questions the motivation for his crusade's inspiration to repay the kindness of those villagers who helped him when he became lost and ill on his descent down K2.

Was he really abducted and held for eight days by the Taliban?

Has his charity built all of the schools that he has claimed?

This book is sad because I believed in Mortenson's story.

All of this reminded me is some ways of the story of Lance Armstrong and his deception as a bike racer and how it affected his charity work.

The good deeds are real and the people who work at them are not part of the deception. Or are they? Where does the good become evil?

All of Jon Krakauer’s proceeds from the sale of Three Cups of Deceit will be donated to the “Stop Girl Trafficking” project at the American Himalayan Foundation, so I don't think he is in this to make a profit.

The space created between these two books is a very uncomfortable space for me. It is that space where someone or something you admire falls from grace. You don't want to believe the bad news, even when the evidence is presented to you, you still want to believe in the good part of the person and the cause.

Open Educational Resources

The digital age has brought us more and more free online educational resources. This video is a quick overview of Open Educational Resources (OER) which is an area getting increasing attention from educators at all grade levels.

Of course, these resources are open to anyone, not just educators but any student or learner.

What are they, why are they popular, and what do educators need to be cautious about in using them? You can follow the video with more at edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/03/29/what-is-oer

A 16mm Education

My elementary school days were the 1960s and back then seeing a film in class was a big deal. Those 16mm educational films often left a bigger impression on me than the books and lessons. A decade or so later and I was the teacher in the classroom and I became very good at threading those old 16mm projectors that often ate up the film.

Television as an educational tool was pretty rare. I recall my fellow students sitting on the floor of the gym in 1962 to watch one small television set as John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.

A bit more than a decade later I was threading one of those 16mm projectors as a teacher to show my students films. Some teachers took advantage of using films a bit too often. We called them "plans in a can" and they were popular emergency plans in case you were absent without warning or on a day before vacation.

I was pretty frugal in my use of films, but I also taught a course on film and video production, so I think I had legitimate reasons to show films. Before there were home video players, 16mm films were the only way to do it.

The Sony Betamax hit the U.S. in 1975, and my school bought a VHS videocassette recorder (VCR) in 1977 when it was edging out the Betamax for the home video market. That VCR was something I used more and more, though my students were still shooting their own video on reel-to-reel VTRs (videotape recorders).

Sony changed that with their 1983 Betamovie cassette camcorder. My school bought a full size VHS camcorder and so did I. My first home movies of my newborn son were recorded with a video camera plugged into a VHS deck.

But I have very fond and surprisingly vivid memories of those old 15mm films that I saw as a kid in school.

Many of them have emerged online. I assume that many of these films have had their copyright lapse, or maybe the companies that produced them have gone out of business or just don't care about their use any more.

I recall this film on "Lunchroom Manners" as one I saw in school. I also recall Pee Wee Herman using part of it in one of his shows. Watching "Mr. Bungle" in school settings today reminds me of my own school and the kids look like a lot I did then and my fellow students. Since I have no film and video of my own early days, these are like home movies.



I can imagine teachers in the late 1940s and 1950s showing in a health class films like the 1951  "Going Steady." (It doesn't portray going steady as a good idea.) And I'm not sure how teenagers in 1949 would have viewed the tips in Dating Do's and Don'ts. These were made by Coronet Instructional Films, which produced hundreds of films for the school market.

Public domain films from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archive and Archive.org can be a real trip down memory lane for people who came of age in the 1940s through the 1970s.

But the films I saw in school that left the biggest impression on me were the ones about science. Many of them were well made and from Hollywood producers and studios. I vividly recall "Our Mr. Sun," a film directed by Frank Capra who is best known for It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and many others.



That film launched the Bell System Science series. My father worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey then, so I thought then that he might have had some vague connection to these films (he didn't). It was the time time of the space race with Russia and an early version of STEM education that we all needed to know more about science. My father was determined I would be the first in the family to attend college and really wanted me to become an engineer.

With animation and live action, "Our Mr. Sun" was really well-made for the time. Capra had been producing documentaries for the Army during WWII such as the Why We Fight series and this documentary side business continued after the war. I know I saw that film multiple times in school, but this Technicolor beauty was originally telecast in 1956 and 1957 to 9 million homes and then some 600 16mm prints were distributed to schools and community organizations through the Bell Telephone System film libraries.

Another film I recall was on the atom. I grew up in that "atomic age" when the fear of nuclear war was very real. The film I recall was produced by Walt Disney Educational Media. Walt Disney began hosting his own television show for ABC in 1954. In exchange for a weekly hour-long Disney television program, ABC was funding some of the construction of Disneyland. The show was originally named Disneyland but went through later incarnations as Walt Disney Presents, Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, The Wonderful World of Disney etc. All in all it ran for an amazing 54 years.

The "Our Friend the Atom" was a pro-nuclear energy film but it did compare atomic energy to a genie in a bottle, both of which are capable of doing good and evil.



Not all the films were about hard science and another one I recall must have had some impact on my decision to go into the humanities and major in English. Another from the Bell Science series produced by Frank Capra was "Alphabet Conspiracy" which was the story of the science of language and linguistics. The premise was a plot to destroy the alphabet and all language and it featured the very odd Hans Conried.

The growth of television after WWII scared many parents and educators. Kids were watching a lot of TV and, like film and comic books before it, the fear was that it would rot their minds. The same cry was heard with videogames, the Internet and now with smartphones, which contain all those formats.

I wrote my Master's thesis on the influence of television on children in regard to violence and isolation. There is no doubt that all this media influenced several generations, but I'm not sure that it rotted any brains. I suspect it inspired many kids.

Having an Online Degree on Your Resume

Online degrees have existed since the late 1990s, and online courses and distance learning has been around even longer. All of those are much more "accepted" than they were 20 years ago.

At one time, employers were hesitant to consider hiring job applicants who earned their degrees online. It was a time when there were legitimate concerns bout the legitimacy of online degrees and about some of the less academic institutions that were giving them out.

As more colleges got better at the delivery models and established quality standards, acceptance grew. Of course, companies that hired graduates of online programs and found the to be good employees helped too.

Acceptance came first in technology industries where trust for learning online seemed more natural.

U.S. News published an article, "4 Questions Employers Ask About Job Applicants With Online Degrees."

In brief, those questions are:

1. Is the online program regionally or nationally accredited.
2. Why did you choose to pursue a degree online?
3. Did you develop skills in teamwork and group collaboration through the program?
4. To what extent were you able to interact with the program's other students?

Makerspaces

Makerspaces (AKA hackerspaces, hackspaces, and fablabs) are creative, do-it-yourself (DIY) spaces where people can gather to create, invent, and learn. A large number of them have been opened in libraries and more recently in public spaces and on campuses.
The makerspace may contain 3D printers, software, electronics, craft and hardware supplies and tools that most individuals can't afford to own but want to learn to use.

I read an EDUCAUSE "7 Things" sheet back in 2013 on makerspaces that had predicted that "As makerspaces have become more common on campuses and have found their place in public libraries and community centers, their influence has spread to other disciplines and may one day be embraced across the curriculum. Eventually makerspaces may become linked from campus to campus, encouraging joint project collaboration." They even went as far as to say that the work done there "may one day be accepted and reviewed for college credit in lieu of more conventional coursework."

From my observation, they seem to have made more inroads in K-12 than in colleges. This month, there will be a Makers Day here in New Jersey (March 21 - see http://njmakersday.org) which I will unfortunately miss as I will be at another conference. I'd like to see what people are doing in NJ because I am working on a presentation that involves makerspaces for another conference in May.

The benefits of having a makerspace in an academic setting or available to students offers many opportunities. Providing the space and materials for physical learning works because it can be cross-disciplinary, provide technical help for work they are undertaking. It seems more STEM, STEAM or suited to engineering and technology but if you look at the projects in some of the links below there is a lot that id outside those areas. If you see students work in these spaces, you have to be impressed how students take control of their own learning with projects they define, design and create.

Although I work in higher education, anyone who teaches at any grade level knows that students love hands-on projects. I think that these spaces are a very fertile ground for work that bridges ages - a great place for K-20 work and a way to connect parents and the community to schools.

FIND OUT MORE

http://makerspace.com is probably the world's largest community of Makers, from Maker Faire and Make: Magazine

Watch Makerspaces in Libraries youtube.com/watch?v=hOqTcQedDrw and an example from the Westport Library  youtube.com/watch?v=nurj3zBlfIg

A list of makerspaces in libraries   http://library-maker-culture.weebly.com/makerspaces-in-libraries.html

Make it at your library   makeitatyourlibrary.org http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/a-librarians-guide-to-makerspaces/
Makerspaces in K-12 schools   edutopia.org/blog/creating-makerspaces-in-schools

Some of the tech tools and resources used are very sophisticated, such as a 3D Printer http://cucfablab.org/book/3d-printers or an electronic cutter http://cucfablab.org/book/electronic-vinyl-cutters, but they might be much more familiar, such as the Xbox Kinect 3D scanner http://cucfablab.org/book/3d-scan-and-print-yourself-3d or a computerized sewing machine http://www.brother-usa.com/Homesewing

Is Competency the New Mastery?

In 2014, I started seeing more articles about Competency-Based Education (CBE) as the new approach to higher education degrees. In 2013, I think that "mastery" might have been the buzzier word. Mastery got a big push last year from things like Khan Academy and founder Sal Khan's belief that mastery of a skill or concept before moving on was what was lacking in American education overall.

A simplified explanation of the difference, perhaps from the view of an employer, is measuring what they know (mastery) versus what they can do (competency).

Is competency the new mastery? I did some searching and turned up a piece called "Competency vs. Mastery" by John F. Ebersole (president of Excelsior College) on the Inside Higher Ed site that compares these two approaches to "validating" learning.

He suggests that “competency” could be akin to subject matter “mastery” and might be measured in traditional ways - examinations, projects and other forms of assessment.

Ask that hypothetical woman-on-the-street if they would rather hire someone who had mastered a skill or was competent, I suspect mastery would win out. Of course, that person's ability to apply what they have mastered into a practice might still be in question.

It may be semantics, but considering someone to be "competent" sounds to many people like "adequate." That article gives as an example those instructors we have experienced as students who had "complete command of their subjects, but who could not effectively present to their students. The mastery of content did not extend to their being competent as teachers."

What would you say a subject matter exam measures? Mastery? Might an undergraduate have mastered subject matter or skills but still not be competent in her chosen field?

Looking online at the available books on competency-based education and training, most of them are in healthcare and clinical supervision, which is also the programs discussed in the article. Does the CBE approach work with other disciplines?

Some interest in CBE comes from that often-heard idea that employers don't view new college graduates as ready to do the job. They expect to have to further train the new hire who has "mastered content, but [is] not demonstrating competencies."

Ebersole says that "To continue to use 'competency' when we mean 'mastery' may seem like a small thing. Yet, if we of the academy cannot be more precise in our use of language, we stand to further the distrust which many already have of us."

Yesterday, I was thinking about differentiating mastery and competency in the light of movements such as competency-based education and degree programs.

The Mozilla Open Badge project and other initiatives have tried to standardize the use of badges for documenting learning. I like the idea but I don't see that badges have made any serious entry into educational institutions.

Badges have been used to mark what a person knows or what they can do. Proponents say using them is more student-centered and more about real student learning. It's certainly more real than using seat time and time on task as a measurement. Because a student has completed 9 credits hours proves nothing, and more often we hear that employers also question that getting an "A" grade for those 9 credits also doesn't prove any mastery or competency. Enter competency-based or evidence-based approaches to learning.

I still think about the merit badges I earned in scouting when this topic comes up. The badges were extrinsic motivators and they worked for me and most of my fellow scouts. You wanted to get them. I liked the ceremonial awarding of them at meetings and the recognition. My mom and my "den mother" were pretty conscientious about signing off that I had completed the requirements to earn them. But much of the work I had to do was on the "honor system" and I'm sure I cut corners on some things and got away with it.

If I earned a badge for "climbing" (as in rock and mountains), would you say I was competent at the sport? Would you say I had mastered it? I don't think I'd be comfortable saying either one of those things. I had learned about it and I had done some actual activities involved with it. I had not mastered it and I'm not sure a real climber would say I was competent enough to do it on my own or very seriously.

As Bernard Bull and others have pointed out, this same critique can be leveled at letter grades. Do both make school about "earning instead of learning?"

We also associate badges with video games and in the gamification of learning they play an important role. In the pure gaming environment, earning badges, points, power pills or whatever tokens are given sometimes does take precedence over learning. Then again, some games aren't much interested in learning.

It's better to think of badges as markers, milestones of progress rather than as a goal. 

The Mozilla project and others have tried to give more trust in badges as credentials and educational currency. Education has always valued tests, score and credits as evidence of learning even though we have been arguing about it for hundreds of years and continue to do so.

If the organization awarding the badge is credible, then the real concern is what evidence is being used to determine the completion. As with the goals and objectives we now hold as important in schools, some things are more easily measured.

Want to earn the "Miler" badge? Then run a mile in under 5 minutes and have it verified by the teacher or coach. Want to earn the "Team Player" or "Leadership" badges? Then... play on a team... be the captain...  Hmmm. Those are tougher things to measure.

Students, teachers and schools have talked for a long time about trying to get away from a reliance on just grades, but grades persist. Portfolio assessment and other movements have made a dent in some instances, but the quantifiable test score still wins the day. That stopwatch on the mile runner is easily validated. Today there is more testing and data being used and more complaints about its use.

Learning Beyond Letter Grades was a course offered last year that examined why so many schools use and rely on letter grades. "Where did they come from? What do they tell us and fail to tell us about the learners? What is the relationship between letter grades, student learning, and assessment?" That's a lot to ask in a six-week course, but it comes from this desire many of us have to consider authentic and alternative assessments, peer assessment, self-assessment and badges.

Some badges set an expiration date, meaning the badge bearer will need to return for more training or provide updated evidence to keep the badge.  That's an idea from the world of professional development, licensing and credentials. If you earned a computer programming or phlebotomy badge in 2001, should it still be valid today? Perhaps not.

Perhaps the most difficult hurdle in launching a competency or mastery-based program might be how to assess/validate learning. We have been hitting that one back and forth for centuries.

This post also appeared at Serendipity35

Finding Standards for Education

Two years ago I was writing about how educational assessment was moving more and more online as one way to standardize how students are assessed.

Last fall, I noticed that an ASCD poll on the "Most Attention-Getting Topics for the Year in K-12 Education" had at the top of its list the Common Core Standards and their orientation, implementation and assessment, which received 77% of the votes from participants.

Although I spend my time these days in higher education, I taught English in public secondary schools for 25 years too. My current work with the NCTE has had me paying increasing attention to the Common Core State Standards.

In general, I would say that I like standards. Even in education, I think most people would agree that there should be some kind of standards for what a student learns in any American school system. And there are standards that have evolved without any governmental agencies participating.

Consider mathematics - it would be difficult to find any American elementary school that did not teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions and decimals. Perhaps not all schools would agree about when each part should be taught or the best method for teaching each concept. That's unfortunate because they will have a real impact on the kind of students we see in the years to come.

The Common Core Standards are an effort to provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them.

The standards were designed to be robust and relevant to the real world and hopefully reflect the knowledge and skills that young people need for success in college and careers. Since this is a national effort, there is much talk about American students being prepared for the future and being able to "compete successfully in the global economy."

The Common Core standards were designed in 2009 and adopted in the next two years by 45 states and the District of Columbia. The Standards have support from the Obama administration but Governors Fallin (R - Oklahoma) and Haley (R - South Carolina) recently signed laws ending adoption of the reforms in their states and Indiana’s Board of Education formally abandoned the benchmarks in late April.

If all this Common Core sounds more political than educational, then you are thinking along the same lines as many educators. Much of the Common Core conversations that get media coverage come from meetings like that of the National Association of System Heads, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities - places where discussion on the Higher Ed for Higher Standards was also conceived.

Common Core opponents point out that the new coalition is a project of the Collaborative for Student Success, which receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which has been a promoter of the Common Core and is a big fan of big data.

It's hard to totally disagree with those intentions. But the Standards have been met with lots of resistance from teachers, schools and even from states. I think that is to be expected with any federal program that tries to set English and math standards and is pushed not only by the current administration in Washington, D.C. but also by education trade organizations and non-profits providing funding.

Some states have put on hold or even de-funded implementation of the standards. Some have pulled out of the consortia developing tests tied to them.

Federal programs like Race to the Top grants and No Child Left Behind waivers are often tied to the adoption of Common Core standards and assessments. But the Race to the Top money is now spent and so states are taking a different view at Common Core.

It is dangerous for anyone to make an overly-simple explanation of the standards in just a few sentences. For example, a lot of press early on was that Common Core requirements reduces the amount of classic literature, poetry and drama taught in English classes by 60 percent in favor of reading non-fiction and the "prose of work."  The Standards do place more emphasis on non-fiction, but there is a good argument that the balance of fiction to non-fiction was an imbalance on the fiction side. (This admission coming from a literature major and someone who taught more literature than non-fiction to students for 25 years.)

In the math area, it delays the progression to Algebra I (seen as the gateway course to all higher math) by two years.

Media coverage, like this NPR report, like to point out the extremes and inconsistencies.

The man-on-the-street can easily see that if a fourth-grader in Arkansas gets a “proficient” on his state test but would have been given a "failing" score on that test if he lived in Massachusetts, means something is wrong.

I am not enough of an expert to praise or condemn the Standards, and I no longer toil in the fields (a nicer image than "being in the trenches") of K-12 education on a daily basis. I do think that all educators, especially those who are at the colleges, need to become better informed.

And those assessments...

Assessment movements usually start in K-12 by state or federal mandates and sometimes trickle up to higher education later. In the past 2014-15 academic year, more than forty states implemented online testing programs. Thirty states already do their summative assessments online.

New assessments will require more than just changes in instruction. Unfunded requirements for  different tech devices and high-speed bandwidth are part of the needs list. Online assessments generally include not only the traditional multiple-choice questions, but also simulations, computer-based items, short answers, and more writing.

These new assessments are being created by two major consortia of states, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). They are based on (not part of) the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and will try to assess address higher-order thinking skills and problem solving.

The overall objective seems to be to cover all the standards, some of which are difficult to measure, especially online.

Why online? Online testing is appealing because you can obtain results quickly and get a lot of additional data. For example, which problems did students spend the most time pondering; which answers were changed; at what point did last minute guessing seem to occur.  Hopefully, teachers can use the rapid results to change instruction for classes or specific students.

I have mentioned before that I don't see very much interest in higher education for the Common Core State Standards system that is impacting K-12 education. I did come across an article from The Chronicle titled "College Leaders Sign On to Support Common Core Educational Standards" that discusses how 200+ higher-education leaders have created an organization to voice support for Common Core. Thirty states are represented by mostly administrators at public colleges and universities.

An earlier version of this article appeared at Serendipity35