I know what they know

Well, we are in week 3 of hour alternative schooling...home school, f2f and online all in one! It's been an interesting adjustment, but not a difficult one. We usually start at 7:30 am and finish by 1:30 pm. Then, we scoot out for gymnastics, sailing, the library or a trip to the beach.

Homework is usually very little -- just stuff that didn't get done in the day, rather than more of the same busy work, worksheets.

Best of all, I know what my kids are learning and what they know. No more random grades on a report card, or graded worksheets with letters or percentages of correct/incorrect items. Now, when they get something wrong, we correct it right away by working through it again. We don't wait for weeks or months for the report card to show up to tell us we didn't know what we were supposed to know.

In K12.com curriculum, history is an important element, as is all the usual cast -- math, science, language arts, etc. But history has a special place and is well presented in a manner is fascinating for the kids. They are anxious to learn about the past and happy to discuss how it is or isn't like their lives today.

Working side-by-side, we can make connections on the spot. We can reason through something that doesn't make sense, or pop online if we need more info. We don't have to wait to go to the computer lab to do research, nor do we need to wait our turn to check out a book to give us more information.

Art is part of our weekly learning, where we not only learn about and practice art techniques, but we learn how to discover art, how to interpret art, and how to appreciate it. And there is always some interesting tidbit of information about the artist and his/her life.

Spanish is delivered online through fun, interactive stories and activities. We can then chat about words, ideas and phrases and practice them whenever and wherever the occasion presents itself.

We have P.E. every day. Sometimes we ride bikes, play soccer or go to organized sports like gymnastics, football, sailing, etc. Most days, we jump in our pool to play Marco Polo and to cool down.

The down sides,well, there are a few. No recess with all our buddies. No side chat in the back of the room with classmates. No assemblies. However, we are looking forward to starting the f2f part of the Hawaii Technology Academy, where we believe some of these down sides will be appeased.

Moving my kids and myself from traditional to alternative ed

This summer has been one of bold changes. Since we thought we were going to be moving to Europe (husband is in the Navy, which means lots of moves), we prepared ourselves for big changes. For starters, I decided to leave my teaching job at St. Anthony School so that a new teacher could step in the first of the school year. I will only be managing the grant project for the school. The grant, called Schools of the Future, is to help schools transform from traditional schools to schools of the 21st century, read -- schools that practice critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, communication, etc. This parring down of my responsibilities will also give me more time to focus on my kids' education and to complete the last few courses for my PhD in educational technology.

Now, the biggest move has been to take the kids out of St. Anthony School, a very traditional Catholic school (it has yet to "transform") and to put them in a hybrid charter school called Hawaii Technology Academy (HTA). This school is quite the model for alternative schools -- at least for 2009. It combines online, face-2-face and home schooling for K-12 students. It uses a recognized curriculum called K12 (K to the 12th power) as its base. Students get the best of all 3 learning scenarios.

This move has already been a great learning experience for me too. I now play the role of "learning coach" for my kids (8 and 6). I am looking forward to this experience as a way to discover alternative education for K-12 -- I will compare it to all that I have read about needs of the 21st century, disruptive innovation, etc. More details to follow!

Future Studies - Post from 6/20/09

This past year has been an incredible journey into the “futures”. It all started with a seminar class where I, along with my cohort, were introduced to Dr. Jim Dator’s futures class. I was fascinated by the presentation given by 2 futures doctoral students who showed us how futures theories and methods are practices for forecasting and then planning for preferred futures.

It occured to me — why don’t we educational technologist ever engage in futures practices? Why do we always seem to be playing “catch the technology” and then figure out how to use it? Why aren’t we more proactive about considering technologies on the distant horizon and why don’t we plan for their implications instead of waiting to deal with them when they arrive (and usually they arrive in the hands of our students before making way into our classrooms)?

I decided I needed to learn more about this futures stuff and so I took Dator’s Futures in Education course in the fall of ‘08. It was one of the most intellectually challenging and stimulating courses I have ever taken. It included doc students from political science and the school of architecture. The course was team taught by Dator and Ray Yeh, accomplished campus architect and former dean of the school of arch. It was truly an interdisciplinary course, which was centered around a problem-based learning project. Our task was to engage in a deep understanding of the historical perspectives surrounding higher education and then to apply futures theories and methodologies and architectural design methods to construct four alternative campus scenarios for UH Manoa in the year 2050.

I am presenting the outcomes of this project at the 2009 EdMedia conference this June.

We are in fact continuing on with this project to refine our scenarios and to present them to an international panel of futurists this fall 2009. Our research group is called the Alternative Campus of the Futures Research Group and we are based here at the School of Architecture.

Stay tuned for more!

Ongoing Questions - Post from 6/20/09

Ever since I started this Ph.D. journey I have had the same question on my mind….how do we keep our children grounded in our physical world, when we keep shoving digital spaces and tools

at them? How dare we accuse them of becoming obese, lazy, uninterested in “reality,” when we are the ones creating these virtual worlds for them to get lost in! What are our responsibilities to see that their futures are happy, real, safe?

I hope I can find a way to discover the answers and possible solutions to these questions! More on this later.

Where have I been? Post from 6/19/09

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog. That is mainly because edublogs keeps screwing with my password! Needless to say, I get so frustrated trying to fix it that I rarely come back to update. I am updating now because…well it’s time…and my 698 class has inspired me to revisit old thoughts!

A Pirate Store for Tutoring - Post from 7/9/08

This short video clip includes Dave Eggers at the TED Conference discussing his non-profit tutoring center in San Fran. It’s not just your average tutoring center…but I don’t want to give the story away. You must see it to be inspired. One of the most interesting aspects of the center is that it shows us what education in the future may look like, feel like, and operate. All, very simple, all very community. All very inspiring.

Here it is: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dave_eggers_makes_his_ted_prize_wish_once_upon_a_school.html

Eureka! I finally found one! Post from 6/19/08

After reading

dozens of articles on game play and learning I have finally found one article that discussed “transfer.” Stevens, Satwicz and McCarthy (2008) address this concept of transfer from game play to “the rest of kids’ lives” as a plea of sorts encouraging gaming researchers to consider the importance of ethnographic studies of gaming and transfer. Their goal was to describe how in-game activity is tangled up with in-room and in-world activities (in-world meaning their daily lives). Their ethnographic study included thirteen children between the ages of 9 and 15. They observed how the children interacted during and after the games and discussed their in-game, in-room and in-world interactions. They concluded that the children did in fact transfer some of their moral in-game practices to their in-world thinking. What was most interesting to me was the fact that these researchers are encouraging the focus of gaming on transfer, not just on learning and how games are not just good for learning because they contain well-designed principles of learning, but rather because they provide the setting for children to interact and share their knowledge, thus empowering them. I hope to contribute to this seemingly new area of interest in digital gaming as it applies to real life. Therefore, I will continue to focus my attentions (for now) on how environmental or science based digital gaming may effect how children interact with their surroundings.

Placed Based learing for Digital Ed? Post from 6-19-08

In my quest to gain a better understanding of how to connect digital learning to transformative learning I am auditing a course called Interdisciplinary Science for Teachers. This course is based on the premise that Place-based education (learning) is the key to connecting students to science which thereby makes science more relevant and meaningful to their lives. This is an interesting concept because it basically seeks to situate the student between his life and life experiences and the content being learned.

Furthermore, according to Wikipedia “place-based education promotes learning that is rooted in what is local–the unique history, environment, culture, economy, literature, and art of a particular place -that is, in students’ own “place” or immediate schoolyard, neighborhood, town or community.”

Can place-based education be used as the foundation for digital games and digital learning to help connect what the students learns in digital games to real life situations? Can it help the student who learns via digital games transform his daily actions? If so, can it be used to teach the student sustainability concepts which he then applies?

In our first day of class, Dr. Chinn and her co-teacher Jennifer Hoff lead us through a “sense of place,” where we wrote about several childhood experiences that we believed connected prompted our environmental awareness we possess today. After a brief writing exercise we shared our thoughts within our groups. It made for interesting conversations and lead to connections we found between each other and our childhood experiences. Later, we took a field trip to a local stream where we engaged in some hands-on science experiments to test water quality and to track local versus invasive fish. At the end of our day we debriefed and spoke of the relevance of our experiments in relation to our daily lives. It was an interesting day and will provide me with plenty of new questions on how to make digital learning transformative.

Day 3. Today we went to Mokulea Island, the last remaining Hawaiian Fishing Village in all of the state of Hawaii. There are four families who live on the island. They are direct descendents of original families of this fishing village. Our work today involved helping to plant native vegetation to prevent soil erosion, to pick up and dispose of trash, and to gain a better understanding of how to use sea birds as barometers of the health of the sea and the land. It was a perfectly sunny and breezy day. There were many good interactions and conversations going on between the teachers and the researchers. These types of connections are what lead to effective environmental awareness campaigns and action. We were able to make a connection with the people of this island when we learned about the decades of suffering they have endured as a result of urbanization and modernization. It is safe to say we worked today to benefit their lives as much as the lives of the ecosystems that we hope will thrive here again.

I have missed out on many of the other field trips. However, I have been enthralled with what I have participated in and observed about place-based learning in science education. I hope by the end of the course to gain a better understanding of how place-based education can fit into technology-based learning

But can they transfer it to real life? Post from 6/13/09

Just read some of Gee’s book, “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy,” (2003) and I’m becoming fascinated with this topic. I think I will soon be playing video games. In the meantime, I still want to discover how does the student (i.e. player) take what he’s learned from the video game and apply it to real life? Gee. Prensky, and Arnseth have lots of wonderful, positive news to share about the benefits of well-designed video games but there seems to be a lack of research on video games as tranformative learning tools. Where Gee says, “…video games are powerful learning devices for shaping identities” (2003, p. 200), he also wonders how the “…prospective identity can possible transform the player’s hopes, values and fears” (2003, p. 201).

If we look to how the military uses video gaming to train soldiers we may find proof of video gaming as a transformative learning tool. I will have to look into research on the military’s findings if there are any. Does anyone have insight on this topic?

Playing to learn - Post 6/9/08

Just read two good articles on gaming and its effects on learning. Both articles (Prensky, 2003; Arnseth, 2006) suggested that teachers don’t have to be entertainers

to gain students’ attention. Instead, they need to step-up their teaching strategies and make them more challenging, more multi-modal, and more diverse. Both articles also suggested that while students learn on a “deeper” level while gaming, they have not been able to transfer what they have learned to everyday practice!

It is within the last sentence that I find my concerns: Can kids take what they learn from gaming and apply it to their lives? Can digital gaming reach transformative learning? Can we teach students content that requires hands-on engagement (i.e. environmental sciences) and reaches their affective domain through digital games? What will the future classroom

look like if digital gaming is part of the teaching strategy? This is the beginning of my quest. I hope to discover whether digital games on sustainability can help the elementary-age student transform his everyday practices. This is simple I know, but it’s a beginning.

What is sustainability? Post from 6/7/08

Sustainability basically means the ability to meet today’s needs without compromising the resources available to future generations.

A well-known quote originating from Native American Indian culture provides insight into the importance of practicing sustainability:

Do we inherit the earth from our ancestors or borrow it from our grandchildren? (Native American)

[from Wikipedia] It has generally been accepted that achieving sustainable development will require balancing environmental, societal, and economic considerations in the pursuit of development and an improved quality of life. A number of ideals and principles underlying sustainability have been identified. These include intergenerational equity, gender equity, just and peaceable societies, social tolerance, environmental preservation and restoration, poverty alleviation and natural resource conservation

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Research Question from 6/7/08

Here I will begin to draft my research question.

Ultimately I am concerned that learning about sustainability in a virtual learning environment will remove the student’s connection to earth, to the human side of environmental engagement. That it may cause the student to “disconnect” from the reality of engaging with the environment. That it will in fact distance his understanding of what it means to practice sustainability.

How do we keep the student grounded when he is learning through technology?

How do we keep the student connected to “place” and “people” when he is learning through technology?

Can virtual learning tools cause transformative learning? I hope to better understand this question by taking a look at the field of sustainable education, which is hands-on, place-based, requires the student to engage in tangible activities and aims to affect the way the student practices everyday living for the benefit of the environment.