Ocotillo Retreat 2002... is our annual gathering to share and discuss instructional technology at Maricopa.

Retreat 2002
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Ocotillo Retreat 2002:

Notes from Alan November's Presentation

"Creating a New Culture of Teaching and Learning"
"If educators are expected to make the best use of emerging technologies, then we need to create a new culture of teaching and learning, including collegiality, new relationships with family and community, leadership and decision-making, students who are much more self-directed and interdependent, and new models of curriculum and assessment and our concept of time."

Alan led us in a discussion to discover what the "culture" is at Maricopa. See the list for what has accumulated so far...

"From Smart Toilets to Smart Schools"
"This provocative and humorous look at different ways of using technology to improve learning will challenge participants to examine their basic assumptions about how to plan for information technologies. The challenge? How can we move from simply improving current reality (flushing the curriculum faster) to creating visions of learning that will provide our students and communities with the skills that they will need to navigate in a complex global economy?"

As an example of "lateral thinking" (looking at one problem and its solutions as a way of applying it to something completely different), Alan asked the group to brainstorm a list of potential features if we were to have available a high bandwidth, Internet connected toliet. The ideas were then related directly to what happens to the way we look at the features of technology in education.

It is not the technology, but the information that is important.
The hardware becomes invisible, shrinking, less obvious.
"All of you in this room are digital immigrants, you speak digital with an accent. You are paper trained!"
Middle school kids know much more about technology than high school kids, and this is the wave of a digital generation coming our way.
Information can be used in two ways: ( We are likely somewhere in between)
1. Totalitarian (Computer data used to support South Africa Apartheid)
2. Empowerment

It is not technology that is important, but who controls the information in the organization-- the digital age is a signpost of a massive shift in control.
Privacy and security are at risk
There are only two things that can flow through wires:

Information
Communication

People in the digital age need to be:

Information literate- able to understand how information is structure and how it is related to other information.
Communications literate- how to be a global citizen.

Two ways to think about the impact of technology:
1. Automate: There is no shift of control of information- bolt technology onto what you already do. This is the approach known as "spray and pray". Research shows there is little added value from automation, and incremental improvement. See:
  "In the Age of the Smart Machine : The Future of Work and Power" by Shoshana Zuboff
2. The answer to the pitfalls of automation is that you must claim that with a use of technology you can do something that was not possible before, give access to information that was not available before.
Are we using technology for building relationships between people? For at-risk students who have been told repeatedly they are not good learners, they are wary of value judgement of their work- the physical classroom can work against them.
Anonymous review of student work by an external person can change the relationship for teachers from being their judge to being their advocate.
Can we build "Knowledge communities of instructors sharing student work?"
"As educators, you should 'rip-off' successful ideas from other sectors (commercial)"
As an example, look at the envorinment of the FanFiction site where participants are able to post their own work, written to follow the style of say famous books, movies (there ar emore than 35,000 postings listed under "Harry Potter"), tv shows, and more. The community portion comes in to the ability to provide anonymous reviews to other writer's works. Participants can also organize and highlight the works of other writers on the site.

A specific example was a teenage girl, known at fanFiction as "WitchGirl", with some 45+ stories online, many with more than 100 reviews. This girl's teacher was surprised, since in class "she never turned in work", yet online, she was prolific.

This media provides a world wide audience while in class, the teacher audience is an audience of 1. "You all are great at what you do, but how can you beat an audience that is the world combined?"
Students will have access to massive amounts of information, and we should leverage tools like FanFiction that can connect them to communities outside the classroom.
We must learn the "grammar" of the Internet, for example the tools that allow us to find out how many other web pages link back to our own (see how easy this is to do with Google)
We should emphasize in all subject areas an understanding of the stucture and relationship of information.

Recommended Reading
This article by Alan November was published in High School Principal Magazine

I'm afraid that kids use the Internet without being taught how to use the Internet. To survive in the future economy, kids must learn how to research, publish, and communicate working with the Internet and other information tools. What skills will be important for kids to learn and for schools to teach? Not how to use Windows or Netscape. Instead, the most vital skills will involve applying knowledge to produce information and facilitate communication. And one of the most important skills will involve evaluating the resources you decide to use. As much time as we spend teaching kids how to find things on the Net, we need to expend 10 times more effort teaching them how to interpret what they've found.

The Web-Teaching Zack To Think
http://www.anovember.com/articles/zack.html

For more of Alan November's work, visit his site at http://www.anovember.com/ or contact him at alan@anovember.com.