TechIntersect

Thanksgiving

Elizabeth Layton was a Kansas native artist who battled depression until she took up drawing at the age of sixty-eight. Her work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, and numerous other exhibits around the USA. Although she is gone now, her memory continues on. You can visit her website at http://elizabethlayton.com/.

One of my favorite pictures by Grandma Elizabeth Layton is the one shown here entitled “Thanks-giving”. She doesn’t like to cook, so the family gets carry-out Kentucky Fried Chicken for the holiday meal. How many harried mothers and grandmothers dream of doing this one year, saying to heck with it, I’m not cooking this year?

Although I am typically not one for discarding traditions, I am starting to wonder about this holiday we call “Thanksgiving” and it’s associated myths. Native Americans don’t like the holiday and what it represents to their people. They don’t like how it perpetuates stereotypes about Indians, and they certainly don’t like how Europeans went on to treat the indigenous people on this continent after that first “Thanksgiving” feast.

GENOCIDE OF AMERICAN INDIAN

Judging from this picture, one can guess that Elizabeth Layton probably would not have a problem with taking the Pilgrims and Indians completely out of Thanksgiving. She was a person of great empathy for the plight of others, providing much in the way of social commentary in her work.

Here’s the thing about Thanksgiving with my family. I don’t recall ever having any discussions of Pilgrims and Indians and that “First Thanksgiving” meal. Any of those sort of myths in my recollection were perpetuated at school, not in my church or in my family gatherings. For my family, Thanksgiving has always been a special time of coming together as a family, and truly being thankful for the blessings we have received.

In a world where people are increasingly feeling entitled, having a holiday that fosters an attitude of gratitude can’t be all bad in my mind. And as Grandma Layton shows us, it doesn’t matter what the meal is, as long as families and friends can come together and be grateful for what we have been given.

Perhaps it is time to think about ways in which we can reinvent the Thanksgiving holiday. I’m not talking about a complete abandonment of traditions, but only a change of course that acknowledges and tries to fix some of the flaws in how we celebrate. For example, in the USA, November is Native American Heritage Month. Instead of keeping the Pilgrim/Indian myths alive, why not replace that tradition with learning something about actual Native American history and culture?

I signed up on Edublogs last spring after attending SXSW because I wanted to join in a global conversation with other educators and to keep a sort of e-journal. I was excited to find one repository of educators using blogging in education. I was so impressed that I quickly offered my $25 to become an edublogs supporter. I figured that it was more than reasonable for what I was receiving. I was recently surprised to learn how few people bother to pay the $25.

Recently, Edublogs began to include advertising on blogs that are not paid supporters. People were caught off guard and some embarassing situations arose like this one:

My blog (msmichetti.edublogs.org) is one that was “hit” with ads today, and it was rather embarrassing. I was showing, via digital projector, my blog to a group of students and educators, and navigated to my blog by entering the direct URL into Internet Explorer. The *first* thing to come up on the screen, both at the top of the page (beneath the header) and on the right (right sidebar) were Google Ads, many of which had nothing to do with education. A couple of clicks around and they were still there.

Although there was a discussion of the potentiality of advertising on the forums several months ago, busy edublogs educators who do not frequent the forums (I admit guilt myself) might not have realized what was coming. They felt blindsided when the advertising was rolled out and it has subsequently been the subject of much discussion and dismay.

Seth Godin has something to say on all of this in his free eBook Tribes Q&A.

Characteristics and actions in a leader that can lead to the death of the tribe include:

•Inability to learn from a mistake
•Pitting members against one another
•Forgetting that a tribe has a life of its own rather than existing as an extension of the leader
•Making decisions based on personal agenda rather than on tribal agenda
•Thinking they cannot learn from their members and worse, thinking they know everything
•Taking a command-and-control approach by:
•Limiting or moderating communication within the tribe
•Exercising hierarchical authority
•Conversely, being too passive and standing by as factions form and turf wars take place
•Allowing drama to exist by:
•Listening to and responding to gossip
•Allowing rumors to circulate and grow
•Devoting time, energy, and resources to deal with personal issues or conflicts
•Passively allowing these activities to exist even if they don’t take part

Edublogs administrators would do well to follow Godin’s sage advice and quickly apologize for this. Dale Carnegie in “How to win friends and influence people” recommends apologizing and accepting blame, even if you feel in the right. I’ve tried it and it works.

Personally, I don’t think Edublogs is blameless in all of this. Perhaps there were issues of communication that prevented notification of each and every Edublogs user, but I think that additional steps could have been taken. I get little notifications and promos at the top of every “Write Post” page. They could have made a big deal on that little widget about the coming advertising, but I don’t ever recollect any such announcement there. Posting it on the forums simply isn’t enough in the eyes of most users, and trying to excuse their actions instead of apologizing will only make it worse.

So what’s going to happen Edublogs? Will you lose your tribe by ignoring the errors that Seth Godin points out? I hope not, because I have no plans of leaving the platform any time soon. It’s really been a great experience to date and I’ve met a lot of great people using Edublogs.

Apologize and fix this!

I fully understand that it costs money to run services like these, and the free lunch has ended. I have no problems with that. You just need to really involve your tribe in a conversation about how to approach this, rather than just rolling it out to see what will happen. Maybe some suggestions will come of it that you haven’t considered. If you must have advertising, you must have absolute certainty that your ads are relevant and appropriate for the audience. It would be better if there were another way to address the issue.

Hopefully you haven’t already done irreparable damage with this move and it can be repaired because I really like using Edublogs.

One of the things I most enjoy is discovering relationships between art and technology, and one such relationship exists in Pointillism. Each year I do a Pointillism project with my students , with some pretty cool results as they discover the process by which a digital camera makes a photograph by recording thousands of tiny little dots of color.

I really think it is fascinating that Georges Seurat explored the possibilities of optical blending of color in his Pointillist paintings over a hundred years ago, and our most modern of technologies, the digital camera, uses a similar concept.

I will never forget standing in front of the “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” painting by Seurat at the Chicago Art Institute staring in amazement. It is so big, and powerful; it sucks you in. It is posted online, and they have a tool with which you can zoom in to have a closer look, but you really must see it in person to fully appreciate it.

I do my best to convey a sense of appreciation for the past while exploring technology in these Pixel Pointillism projects. When we make these pictures as a class, it is always fun to watch the students as the pieces come together and they attempt to identify who or what is in the picture.

Marilyn and Mt. Rushmore were drawn by hand with paper and pencil, while Elvis and Jack Nicholson were printed on a laser printer from a computer. All projects are composites, with multiple students contributing a piece of the work, not knowing what the end result would be. I think the paper and pencil ones are more distinctive and interesting because while each person has an individual style and interpretation of how the pixels should be drawn, when all of the parts are put together, it still works out nicely.

Tags: art, digital photography, Pointillism

When I reported to my first ship the USS Cochrane in Japan, I believe I was there for about a month before I discovered a shipmate in another department who I went to high school with. We sang in the choir together, he moved away, and it was several years later when we wound up serving on the same ship together.

When I was in Navy recruit training during service week, I was assigned to cleaning the drill hall when I got one of the nasty sinus headaches I sometimes get when the weather changes. Remember this is a week of hard work, and you hardly get a chance to even sit down. But the kind-hearted sailor in charge showed me a loft that I could go lie down for a while without getting caught. Turns out, he was from my tiny home town in Kansas and I had even worked at the hardware store for a time with his brother.

On liberty in Hawaii, several years into my hitch in the Navy, I accidentally ran into one of my best friends from high school who moved away when I was in 11th grade. He was also in the Navy and we had lost track of one another, finally meeting on accident in a Waikiki bar. Come to think of it, that was the last time I saw that friend, we haven’t been in touch since.

These kind of chance encounters happen a lot, and it makes me wonder how many times I just walk past someone I should know or somehow be connected to. I think that missing people you should know will decrease as social media catches on. We will become more aware of our existing connections as technology links us together.

For example, a guy I work with and I became acquainted with many folks from around the country at Wakonse last May. Last night he told me about his high school classmate who contacted him to ask how he knew his colleage from Iowa State University (one of our Wakonse friends). The classmate saw the colleague on a friend’s facebook and notified the friend about the connection.

Lesson learned: it doesn’t hurt to browse through your friends friend list to see who they are connected with that you know but are not connected with. I’ve found a number of high school classmates this way. (By the way, if interested, you too can befriend me on Facebook.)

Yes, it’s a small world and through technology it’s getting smaller.

Thanks to Dr. Alec Couros aka courosa on twitter, I just learned about the Life Magazine photo archive on Google.  World-famous Life photographer Gordon Parks is a special hero of mine, hailing from my home state of Kansas. I am eager to begin exploring his Life Magazine photography.

I expect I will spend hours browsing through the Life archive. It is definitely a keeper in my Delicious bookmarks.

My young cousin Jonny was visiting home recently after finishing his recruit training. His dad, my uncle, is a retired Army colonel. Jonny’s sister Sandra is building a photography business and she made these photographs of Uncle Curt and Cousin Jonny. I find the contrasts between the retiree and the new recruit fascinating.

The colonel inspects the private, but the private has a hard time staying serious about the whole thing.

The uniforms might have changed, but the family pride in our service has not.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the one and only time that Uncle Curt & I were also photographed together in our uniforms.

There are several stories behind these photographs that deserve comment here. One is the fact that my cousin Sandra is able to start a business with a digital media technology (photography) with a minimum investment in a small town of 6,000 people. Another is that three young men from the same family, (my uncle, myself, and my cousin) coming from rural Kansas decided to find a better opportunity through joining the armed forces. The armed services of the United States are full of people faced with limited economic opportunities where they were raised. The military career path provides a great opportunity for “disadvantaged” populations of all sorts, including kids from rural areas and kids from inner cities. This choice worked well for my uncle, and while I didn’t make a career of the service, it certainly helped me in building a career. We are proud that Jonny is serving his country too, hoping that it brings good things for him as well.

I marked this day on my calendar a year ago because I didn’t want to let the occasion pass without pause and reflection. On November 12, 1987 I entered into the realm of King Neptune, in hopes of gaining the title of “Trusty Shellback”. For those unfamiliar, a “Trusty Shellback” is one who has crossed the equator aboard ship and successfully endured the acompanying ritual hazing.

(This cartoon by my friend and shipmate Eric Thibodeau sums up what was going on at the time. Check out his fascinating website if you have some time. His career and personal development are nothing short of amazing!)

Lengths of firehose were cut and fashioned into a “shilleleigh” with which the initiators could beat on “slimy polywogs” or sailors who hadn’t yet crossed the equator. In 1987 on my ship the USS Cochrane, the old-style intiation was still administered with a few concessions such as permitting knee protection to be worn by ‘wogs as they crawled around on the deck on hands and knees, but after it was all over, my backside was sore for days! A few years later, as Thibodeau points out, the captain of the USS Missouri wisely limited the initiation to non-physical abuse.

At the time, I remember feeling cheated because I had endured much more than what we were allowed to administer on my second Equator crossing. Looking back, that was just immaturity and our captain was showing great wisdom and leadership by re-writing the rules of the game.

If you think about what was going on at the time, personal camcorders were coming into widespread use. Although these were expressly forbidden during the initiation on the Missouri, our CO A.L. Kaiss knew that anything that happened under his command could wind up on CNN.

The tradition of the “crossing the line ceremony” is an old one, and at times the hazing certainly has gotten out hand. Participation was voluntary, although it was not without peer pressure and chastizement if you elected to sit out.

Perhaps this new world of information in which we live is forcing us to treat each other better. People who behave badly are often exposed on the Internet for the bullies that they are, although some relish the attention.

Handling the Bullies

I think it is important that we help kids understand how to deal with the world’s bullies. I have learned a lot on the subject from the Love and Logic institute. It has really helped me to teach my own kids how to handle teasing.

Last summer at Wakonse, in a room full of 200 people, I cracked up the room when I quipped a quote I picked up at a Love and Logic conference. The audience had just witnessed a tense role-playing exercise involving a stressful faculty interaction including tenure, race relations, and a big bad bully. I suggested that you can disarm a bully by answering crazy talk with crazy talk. Look them straight in the eye and say:

No thanks, I just had a banana!

The room erupted because it is a silly response to a silly situation. Sally Ogden has a great video about teaching kids how to handle the bullies in this way. If only I had known this one-liner, maybe I could’ve talked my way out of the initiation twenty years ago…. Naw, probably not

I was intrigued by the “Troops to Teachers” discussion in the days preceding the US presidential election, because I am both a teacher and a veteran of the US armed forces. Thinking about the role my six years in the US Navy played in my current career, I most certainly would not be who I am today in the classroom without that experience. Since the election is over, I won’t comment on the validity of the idea, but I thought I would share some things I’ve been thinking about with my own experience.

USS Cochrane

The first 20 seconds of the following video gives a glimpse of the very first computer system I worked on as a computing professional.

It shows the plotting room of the digital Mk68 naval gunfire control system on the USS Cochrane (DDG-21). The AN/UYK 20 computer is the breadbox sized machine that contained the brains of the whole fire control system. The large, impressive, control panel with lots of lights and buttons where I am sitting is the computer set control that provided the human interface with the fire control system.The machine with the three circular windows is the control station of the SPG/53F fire control radar. You may even get a chuckle that I worked on a system with a magnetic tape loader, with which we loaded the operational program.

USS Missouri

This video shows my second ship, the USS Missouri. It does not feature the Mk38 fire control system I worked on, but you can see the big guns that we fired from where I worked. The computer system was an analog system instead of a digital system, but it still did the job of solving the fire control problem. This scene shows us departing from Long Beach, CA and heading for war in the Persian Gulf in 1991. If there was ever a life-changing event in my life, it’s certainly that time.

How did the experience in the US armed forces impact my teaching?

I don’t think veterans are any more inclined to teach than the general populace. However, the experience certainly serves me well. Here are some things I learned in the Navy in no particular order.

1. Appreciate diversity. The young men and women serving in the armed forces are a diverse group. I came from white-bread America both literally and figuratively. (Kansas grows wheat & has lot’s of white people.) I learned to get along with everyone, regardless of their ethnicity or cultural background.
2. Understand the physical world. As a Navy gunfire controlman, I received an education in physics unlike any other. My eyes lit up when taking my first college Physical Science course and Chad Davies started talking about battleship guns. Now that was a subject I could relate to! Now I can use that physics knowledge in simulations and games. Check out this flash simulation of a naval gun. It’s rough, but you get the idea.
3. Leadership. Real leaders are willing to do anything they ask their people to do. Real leaders will encourage creative solutions to problem solving, not bark orders and expect people to blindly follow. Real leaders will let the person most able and closest to the problem solve it, then give them the credit they deserve for solving it! My approach to leadership is exemplified in It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy .
4. Life is fragile and precious. There’s nothing like a war to wake you up and put your priorities into perspective. I’m glad I served aboard a ship, rather than have to face terrible things that a foot soldier sees. But it was challenging and sometimes scary. When those tomahawks launched and we knew that in a few minutes someone at the receiving end would die, we knew it was no longer a game anymore, it was the real deal. We wondered what could happen to us in retaliation. We wondered if we would live to see our families again.
   
5. Work hard and play hard. You get the most out of life when you face and overcome a serious challenge that drains you physically, mentally, emotionally, the whole gamut. When we were up for 30 hours straight, doing what we were trained to do, it was as though nothing else mattered in the world except that we do our job and do it well. When it was all over, we felt like we were on top of the world!
   

I think the whole experience of being in the Navy and being in the war taught me to appreciate things more, and to not take myself so seriously. Whenever things seem to be getting difficult, I can always look back on those most difficult of days and question if my current situation is that much of a challenge. So far, it never has been. Hopefully, my attitude of gratitude and humility finds it’s way into my classroom where it can serve as an example to my students. You don’t need to be veteran to appreciate what you have, but it certainly helps.

Happy Veterans Day, and thank you to all who have served to protect and defend freedom around the world!

I just spent an amazing evening with a group of Kansas science and math  educators. After a formal presentation by Kenneth Wesson on brain function and cognition, an impromptu group of interested educators met last evening to discuss how to implement some of the things we have been learning in this conference. Ken is an amazing man, and easily the best conference speaker I have heard in a very long time. He is also the first speaker I have ever seen who was willing to come back for an informal impromptu session with conference participants after the formal sessions had ended! (I heartily give the thumbs up for this man if you need a conference speaker on brain research.)

As the teachers spoke, I began to grasp what is wrong with our education system in this state; perhaps even what could be changed to improve education throughout this country.

Aha! We need to promote innovation.

If there is one thing that we could change to improve the education system, I think it would be to encourage more innovation in the classroom. Our system is designed to encourage conformity. We want our students to conform to the status-quo, and heaven help the teacher who tries to branch out and implement some new instructional methods. There is no support mechanism or reward system in place for innovative teaching. Doing it the same, safe way is what is rewarded, while those who try new methods are ignored at best, and possibly are even punished for their efforts. The end result is our teachers feel powerless.

Human beings have an innate urge to control their environment. Take away all control and you will either have a depressed or confrontational human being. Teachers feel as though they have little control over how and what they teach in the classroom. I recently asked my daughter’s teacher about the science curriculum in the first grade. We don’t really have much time for science with the emphasis on math and reading, was the reply. What?!? We are in a time of tremendous upheaval and opportunity in the world today! We are living in the most amazing time in human history, what do you mean there’s no time for science, I thought to myself. But this notion was echoed by the science teachers I heard last night. Apparently, one cannot teach reading and math while at the same time teaching science.

In listening to the science educators last evening, I got the impression that those who are trying to engage their students in experiential learning activities often go unsupported and unnoticed. If we are expecting improvements in academic performance, this isn’t how it should be. We should reward those teachers out there working hard on professional development, who are learning how to teach better and setting an example of leadership and innovation in their schools.

If I were an Obama advisor.

The time is ripe for change in this country. President-elect Obama ran his campaign on the theme of change. Mr. Obama, I have a dare for you. I dare you to unshackle teachers for a period of one year to unleash their creative solutions on the problems that plague this nation. This means a freeze on formal, government run assessments. Leave the assessment of student learning up to the professionals that we have trained and hired to teach our young people. In other words, LEAVE THEM ALONE for a whole year! Just let them teach! Good teachers pay attention to what they are doing and learn through experimentation. That is the essence of assessment. Finding out what works and what does not work.

Of course, this is a pipe-dream, and Obama doesn’t have the authority to implement what I propose. The real authority comes from our local and state elected officials. The state legislature, which allocates the funding for our schools has the real power to bring about change.

I suggest that a one-year moratorium on state reporting would be sufficient to bring about a radical change in how we teach in this state. It would free up so much time for professional development of our teachers, we would have an an amazing time of innovation in our schools.

Of course, such a proposal would meet stiff resistance. How would we have teacher and school accountability without state reporting. How could we compare our school with the one down the road?

I would argue that the model of freeing up time just to think and create is exactly the model followed by some of the best and most creative companies in the world.

Look at how the best and brightest companies treat employees. Businesses which innovate best do not weigh down talent with burdensome reporting in the name of accountability. Instead, they do all they can to encourage a release of creative energy.

For example, in my week internship at the Wichita Boeing plant (now Spirit Manufacturing) a few years ago, I participated in a weekly staff meeting. My team spent approximately 15-20 minutes on accountability where each staff member brought the team up to speed on the progress made toward personal goals. The rest of the hour meeting was spent brainstorming on ideas of how to reinvent the new company that was forming. What an amazing concept. A quarter of the time spent on accountability for the staff, and three quarters spent on innovation ideas. That was one hour out of a forty hour work week. The rest of the week, the workers were pretty much left alone to do their jobs and do them well, because they are professionals.

Can you imagine if the accountability process for teachers involved a one hour meeting once a week in which groups of ten teachers met with a team leader to discuss the goals they had set for the week?

Little Susie scored an “A” on the math test this week. She’s been really struggling, but things are finally making sense to her. To me, that is a report worth making, because it would provide an opportunity for immediate feedback from colleagues. High fives, congratulations, the works!

Instead we are obsessed with standardized achievement tests, and endless reports that rarely provide any direct, meaningful feedback to the teachers doing the hard work of teaching.

We are in the most amazing of times. The earth is flattening through technology. Paradigms are shifting. Indeed our whole notion of how to be successful through teamwork and collaboration are changing how we do work. These changes need to be implemented in our educational system if we want to prepare our students for the world in which they will live.

I have no illusion that the standardized assessments and government reporting will discontinued at any time in the near future. But I do believe that the time has come to encourage our elected officials and school administrators to start finding ways to reward creative, innovative and effective teaching.

Yesterday, while attending the SMARTT 2008 conference of the Kansas Association of Teachers of Science, I had the pleasure of hearing Homer Hickam speak. Mr. Hickam is the author of the book, “Rocket Boys” which inspired the movie “October Sky”. (I purchased an autographed copy for my kids.) If you have not seen this film, SEE IT! Here is the trailer:

If you havent’ figured out by now from reading what I write about, I love nothing more than when the Sciences & the Arts meet. So a writer who focuses on science and gets a movie made about it will always gain my attention.

I connected with his story because I also came from a small town of limited opportunities. Here was a boy, inspired by Sputnik, who dreamed of building rockets. His story is inspiring to me, and I believe it should be to the kids who live where I am from.

Today’s Sputnik

Today, there is no Sputnik-like, instantly recognizable symbol of the changing world. But we have had our Sputnik and it is called the Internet. Instead of a flashing light overhead, this new Sputnik has eased into our lives over several years time as people adopted it’s use, and the technology improved to the point that it is easily navigable and usable.

I want to challenge and inspire my students, and the kids growing up in rural areas to be like Homer. Not necessarily learn how rockets work (although it suits me if you do), but learn how the Internet and computers work. When I was a high school student, the personal computer was still a novelty, and to use one you had to understand programming. These days, as near as I can tell, schools have abandoned teaching programming in favor of learning how to use applications that someone else has written.

Teachers, let your students play computer games in class. But only the games that the kids themselves create! There are a number of tools that the kids can use to accomplish this goal, two of which are Alice and Scratch. If you don’t know how to use these tools, it’s ok because your students can figure it out for themselves.

Yesterday, Homer Hickam mentioned his 3 P’s to success: Have a passion, have a plan, and perservere! I believe if more math, science, even humanities & social science teachers were open to the possibilities, computer technologies can allow students to latch on to these P’s with amazing results.

The nice thing for students in rural areas with limited resources, the two development environments I’ve mentioned, along with many others, are complely free. You already have what you need to make some modern “digital rockets.” For example, you could try doing a gravity simulation in Alice or Scratch.

I would love to hear from educators in remote locations who are making the most of our new Sputnik, the Internet. How are you inspiring your students to be everything that they can be in these exciting times?