Tech-infused social studies methods

I'm getting a little traction on what I think a "next step" is for tech integration in social studies methods.

First, here's my perception of the current state-of-the-field: ACCESS. Social studies teacher-educators, and social studies teachers, are using tech in instruction/instructional prep to access info: looking for it, gathering it, marking resources on the web that can be re-purposed and used in instruction, etc. It's basically the web as library or repository of learning aids.

So what's next? I'm still murky, but here are my threads.

• The role of tech had better not be to add value to the distributor (e.g., a lesson plan on the web vs. on paper--much better for the person wishing to share it, but for the end user it's all the same or slightly worse than having it on paper). Instead, the role of the tech should be to add value to the end-user BEYOND being able to access it--it adds flexibility (re-mixable) or it links out to other useful resources (organization?). For example, I'm thinking of Wise Pockets--tech is just a delivery mechanism for the info. In contrast, the math applets on teacherlink let the teacher do something that couldn't be done otherwise--these manipulatives can't exist on paper.
• If students are using tech, it's not parallel play but collaborative. If the students' use of tech is to individually access info or do a manipulative, it reinforces the at-your-desk paradigm of education, reduces the discussion and social learning that can make for powerful teaching. So if you're considering a parallel play thing, do it either as a whole class or structure it as groupwork, or push it off into homework (but provide scaffolding to make sure students are attending to the key parts). Example of parallel play: Students individually watch a video clip, then discuss. Example of collaborative play: Students blog about the video clip or work together to mark up or re-edit the clip.
  
• Students' using tech is almost always preferable over teachers' use of tech--unless it's a parallel play thing or the tool is so complex that it bogs the students down (i.e., insight from Randy Bell's astronomy work).
  
• Students using tech to organize or create is almost always better than students using tech only to access info.

Again, I don't have a clear vision of the next step. But I think my instinct is that it will require teachers and teacher-educators to be into a creating/organizing mode on the web...and that requires websites or wikis or blogs or something along those lines.

More thinking about "powerful social studies"

I don't think this is unique to social studies, but it occurred to me this morning that good teaching...

1. Produces the following in the students
1. Learning, specifically
1. Knowledge (key facts for the concept/content area)
2. Understandings (broader frameworks/heuristics which contain the facts)
3. Skills (duh)
4. ...and the ability to transfer this knowledge, these understandings, and these skills to new encounters with the topic/task, whether directly or indirectly
2. Enjoyment! It wasn't a turn-off; students will be willing to do more learning
3. Interest--students are motivated to do some future learning on their own on at least some level
2. Produces all of the above in the teacher as well

What makes this "powerful teaching"? Well, it's entirely possible to teach in such a way that students learn but are turned off (e.g., drill). I guess what I'm thinking of here is that the power comes from what happens after the learning is over--the learning wasn't just a mental exercise, but a little more transformational

And, of course, I think technology can go a long way towards

1. supporting the learning, espec the learning for transfer
2. making enjoyment and interest more probable
   
3. providing tools/competencies for continuing to explore, assuming that a student is interested
4. keeping the teacher-as-learner mode alive throughout a career

Of course, to do any of this, technology needs to be used skillfully (aligned to purposes of instruction, adding value to content/productivity/student action) and not randomly (using it because it's there, or just using what's familiar rather than what's appropriate).

But this still doesn't get into what's uniquely social-studies-related about "powerful social studies."

Unethical but interesting teaching strategy for a high school history class

Just finished reading Marcus, Paxton, & Meyerson (2006). Given students' tendency to "historical fundamentalism" (viewing what the textbook, teacher, and assigned readings say as revealed truth), what if the teacher adopted a "two truths and a lie" style of teaching?

"As I teach, I will occasionally misrepresent or lie. Most of what I say will be true, but I will, every day, say something wrong or unsubstantiated: the First Amendment prohibits public displays of religion, for example, or that at the time of Columbus' landing, the population of North America was greater than that of Europe. Check what I say--look in the textbook, examine other sources. Don't take down my statements as gospel, because they're not. When things don't seem to line up, bring it up. At the end of the (lesson/week/unit), we'll review and I'll show you conflicting evidence."

I imagine that this approach would

1. Go a long way toward diminishing (but not eliminating) historical fundamentalism
2. Be interesting/engaging for students, even for those who aren't busy considering all the angles and checking references.
   

On the other hand,

1. I foresee some students getting confused -- they'll remember the lie (what they heard first), not the truth (what they heard later).
   
2. I imagine that this would be very, very difficult to keep up on the teacher's part--mentally, even emotionally exhausting.

Powerful social studies

Trying to operationalize a buzz word: "powerful social studies." I need this to make sense for me and for my students.

Data points:

• Parker
  
• Brophy & Alleman (2006) have a pretty good definition of "powerful ideas" -- fundamental to discipline, not a broad topic (transportation) and not just a factoid ("the fuel used in airplanes is not the same as the fuel used in cars") but in the midrange (categories of transportation, historical progression, relative merits of what's being transported, infrastructure). This points me at ideas that are important and useful.

Thinking about this for myself, I see a core of knowledge, preferably the kind of knowledge that associates with the powerful ideas suggested by Brophy and Alleman. Along with this knowledge comes certain attitudes and abilities that also must be in place for (IMHO) "powerful social studies" to take place. Here's a cheesy little sketch of it:

So: Sure, students need to know something about history, govt/civics, econ, geography, etc. But I also want them to be

• Curious in the face of new (hist, geo, econ, govt/civ) information (attitude)
  
• Concerned when they perceive problem (injustice, inaccuracy, looming environmental collapse) (attitude)
• Critical of new information -- not accepting it at face value but always seeking to triangulate (attitude/ability -- this is a skill b/c you have to be able to operate on the information while at the same time leaving the door open to altering or reversing the info)
  
• Competent at taking action to resolve problems of information, injustice, looming environmental collapse): looking up new info, expressing oneself, etc. (ability)

And of course you address these all simultaneously -- you can't first teach the "base of knowledge" and THEN do the interesting things (curious, concerned, critical, competent) with this knowledge. Both are developed hand-in-hand.

Generativity in teachers

Quick thought about what separates some of the best teachers (and professors) from the rest, particularly when it comes to using technology: generativity. I've now seen it in enough teachers (ex: MR@BMS) and pre-service teachers (KL@UVA) and professors (JP@NCSU) to recognize it.

Sure, a good teacher is a risk-taker, knows his or her content area, students, curriculum, is clear and fair in interactions with students, etc. But if, on top of that, the teacher is motivated to create learning materials and situations, then the amazing things happen.

Examples:

• Creating peg-board and tags to teach geographic regions
• Creating virtual theater for explaining the staging of Pygmalion
• Creating custom videos and dynamic graphs to explain air pressure and temperature

True, off-the-shelf materials can be used. But when a teacher takes the time to customize or custom-create materials, they generally become more powerful--at least for this teacher and these students.

Plus: A generative teacher is probably going to engage students in more active, student-centered, generative activities.

On the other side: A non-generative teacher is probably more inclined to be transmission-oriented, which lends itself to students tuning out, egocentric fallacy, all kinds of other not-so-optimal dynamics.

So: Watch for this.

Notes on Whose History? (Symcox)

p. 11
"knowledge is a valued commodity, defined by those with power and dispensed to those without. However, from time to time the curriculum itself becomes a vehicle to challenge those power relationships and to transform society."

Notes on Tufte, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

p. 3
Opening anecdote about Gerstner's first day at IBM: hit the 'off' button; "Let's just talk about your business."

p. 4
"Yet PowerPoint is entirely presenter-oriented, and not content-oriented, not audience-oriented. The claims of PP marketing are addressed to speaker...."

"PP convenience for the speaker can be costly to both content and audience. These costs result from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP prsentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spactial resoilution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous docration and Phluff, a preoccupation with format not content, an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch."

"Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when the relevant information is shown adjacent in space within our eyespan."

p. 5
Compares "data graphics based on PP templates" to Pravda graphics.

"But in the reality of day-to-day pracitce, the PP cognitive style is faux-analytical." Compares intricate bulleted lists to computer code. Basically seems to be pushing a more honest, less lazy approach: design the slide yourself (using textboxes and/or graphics) to lay out the interrelation between ideas -- don't just list stuff.

pp. 8-9
Amazing dissection of Boeing slide about Columbia shuttle disaster, showing how the slide soft-peddles the (terrifying) data and implications.

p. 10
Props to Feynman for writing "about much of basic physics -- mechanic, optics, thermodynamics, quantum behavior -- in a 600-page book with only 2 levels: chapters and headings within chapters." Talking about Feynman Lectures on Physics.

p. 11
Feynman also hated bullets.... Ha! "Indeed, for those who have rad Feynman's books, a good way to try to think clearly about evidence and explanation is to ask, 'What would Feynman do?'" Anyone wanna make WWFD bracelets?

p. 12
Gripe: "the PP design style" uses "only about 30-40% of the space available on a slide to show unique content, with all remaining space devoted to Phluff, bullets, frames, and branding."

Singles out EDUCAITONAL ADMINISTRATORS as having especially little to say -- "the really lightweight slides" among the 2,140 examined.

Nothing to say, so add Phluff, which reduces the content further. Instead: use handouts

p. 13
History of PPT: MS bought "Presenter" from the developer ("a software house"). T's point = ppt aesthetic and world is the corporate software world: programming ("deeply heirarchical, nested, highly structured, relentlessly sequential, one-short-line-at-a-time") meets marketing ("fast pace, misdirection, advocacy not analysis, slogan thinking, branding, exaggerated claims, marketplace ethics"). Wow. When you put it that way...it's like the worst of both worlds!!

Compares ppt social style ("The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers") to classic "hegemonic systems" such as Roman state system.

"A better metaphor for presentation is good teaching. Teachers seek to explain something with credibility...." Further explanation by T: Teachers explain, reason, find things out, question, identify and organize content, review evidence, highlight credible authority and not patronizing authoritarianism.

"Especially disturbing is the introduction of the PowerPoint cognitive style into schools. Instead of writing a report using sentences, children learn how to make client pitches and info-mericals, which is better than encouraging children to smoke."

"Rather than being trained as mini-bureaucrats in PPPhluff and foreshortening of thought, students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to The Exploratorium. Or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something."

pp. 14-15
Norvig's Gettysburg address ppt.

pp. 16-18
PPT and statistical evidence. T favors tables rather than cluttered or misleading graphical displays. Ideal: table-graphic. I'm not totally sold. Or I like the idea, but need a stronger example from T.

pp. 19-20
Mocking Harvard School of Public Health's Instructional Computing Facility's sample slides and adminitions ("a witless PP pitch on how to make a witless PP pitch" -- that's kind of beautiful, no?). "The templates dom, however, emulate the format of reading primers for 6 year-olds." (reproduces Dick and Jane page in sidebar.) Hey, those are my IT bretheren!

p. 23
"The Dreaded Build Sequence" = "line-by-line slow reveal"

"But formats, sequencing, and cognitive approach should be decided by the character of the content and what is to be explained, not by the limitations of the presentation."

p. 24
"Presentations largely stand or fall depending on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. The way to make big improvements in a presentation is to get better content. Designer formats will not salvage weak content."

"At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm to content."

"PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector for low-resolution materials. And that's about it."

More to-dos and not-to-dos. Advice = use paper handouts for high-res. Hunh: specifically an 11x17 folded to make 4 pp. "Thoughtfully planned handouts at your talk tell the audeince that you are serious and precise; that you seek to leave traces and have consequences. And that you respect your audience."

p. 25
"In day-to-day practice, PowerPoint templates may improve 10% or 20% of all presentations by organizing inept, extremely disorganized speakers, at a cost of detectable intellectual damage to 80%. For statistical data, the damage levels approach demetia."

"PowerPOint allows speakers to pretend that they are giving a real talk, and audiences to pretend that they are listening."

Stalin-cult propaganda photo spoof. Caption: "Military parade, Stalin Square, Budapest, April 4, 1956. Photograph by AP/Wide World Photos." Yow. Now that I know the date, it's even more poignant.

pp. 26-27
Research basis: Study of "several thousand slides, 5 case studies, and extensive quantitative comparisons between PowerPoint and other methods of communicating information."

Cites others' excoriation of ppt (i.e. Columbia Accident Investigation Board -- Columbia killed by ppt?)

Working out new modes of communication+ work

Had an interesting experience today using Skype. Had a conference call with six other people. Two were on text-only; two had audio in but not audio back out (no mic); two others were at a shared in/out (one machine handling whole connection). It was a weird situation. Basically, 1-2 people could TALK back to me...the rest could talk back via text. How to keep the communication flowing? I ended up narrating a lot, filling in holes, creating structure.... All very strange.

It made me think of the peripatetic school, teaching while wandering. They worked out that the wandering supported their philosophizing. (Or maybe Aristotle just liked to walk...) We are coming at it the other way: we're given the tool (mixed-mode text and voice chat) and we have to work out how it supports our process. It's not intuitive, but you don't get anywhere unless you start moving....

I also thought back to experiences where an instructor had us enter a chat room...too many voices, too little structure. We were given the tool but had no idea how to use it.

The whole SITEmentor experience is about finding out how to communicate and work through these tools. I'm glad to be working it out on a smaller scale. I am thinking the social connections made in the smaller group will help bring out more authentic interaction in the larger groupings.