The Information Diet

The Information Diet

            In this digital age of interconnected-ness, of instant likes, news in 140 characters, and specific target-driven advertisements we might all agree that we live in the age of information overload. But would we go as far to agree that we are the cause of our own information obesity? That’s what Clay Johnson lays out for us in his book ‘The Information Diet, A Case for Conscious Consumption’. He compares informational obesity to food obesity – as food has gotten cheaper to produce, we as a society have become less discerning in our food choices and therefore become obese. Likewise information has become cheaper to produce, as he calls it ‘churnalism’ and therefore we have become less discerning in what information we consume. If pointed advertising is giving us the ‘sweets’ we want or desire or agree with, then why take the time in our busy schedules to cross the street to grab a salad? Johnson covers real physical consequences of our lazy information diets, apnea, poor sense of time, attention fatigue, distorted sense of reality, loss of social breadth, and brand loyalty. Much like going on a food diet He suggest we be conscious of our consumption of information. Johnson promotes data literacy, attention fitness, a healthy sense of humor, canceling your cable or satellite tv subscriptions and getting video entertainment from online choices like Youtube, Hulu and Netflix, consuming locally – pay attention to what’s happening in your neighborhood, city and state, lower your exposure to advertisements, diversify where you’re getting your information from – don’t just go to the same places over and over, balance how much of what you consume, and finally fine tune your information consuming adjustment and seek support from friends and family to combat the symptoms of information obesity. Johnson doesn’t blame the advertisers, news corporations or big businesses on our obesity, they’re just giving us what we want, but on how we as a society consume.  

            There was a time when sports were my gluttonous guilty pleasure. I could spend all Saturday consuming nothing but college football, most of the day Sunday on pro-football. Basketball, baseball, hockey, women’s soccer, and heck I found myself watching two guys running around crazy playing ping-pong on TV. Why? Because it was there, it was on television. I don’t consume sports like I used to, growing family responsibilities curtailed my consuming but also a realization that I was just wasting time away and to what gain?

             Reading this book made me give even more thought to my information diet. I agree with the analogy he uses, we should view it as an information diet and be conscious of what we are consuming and the effects it has on our mental and physical health. In thinking about what I’ve learned from this book and how it might impact my teaching practice I think first of all what a great lesson this is for all of us to learn. How can I teach my students to be considerate of the information they consume as well as myself? Also it will give me pause as to what information I am going to feed my students. Is this information absolutely critical to my overall learning goal or is it just filler?

            Much like politicians who go after the sugary drink makers and try to limit their effect on consumers waistlines, there may be those who disagree with Johnson’s book and blame those who create and produce the information we consume for our poor information diets, but I believe He makes some very valid points to help us become better consumers of information and in the process we’ll become healthier for it.

Students as Designers & The Creative Spirit of Design

Students as Designers & the Creative Spirit of Design

            I really didn’t want to be on camera. There’s something about seeing and hearing yourself on film that can leave you with a little butterfly of uneasiness that I’d rather avoid. So I managed to be the cameraman with one small part for our Students as Designers film project. My wife was a little surprised I didn’t want to be in a starring role, “You’ve been on stage before” she advocated. Film is different I thought and retorted. But the more I thought about it, the more I questioned why is it different? I surmised it’s because when you see yourself on film you are your own harshest critic. At least I am - My voice sounds like that? Ugh, I messed up that line. What is going on with my hair? What is that on my face, it looks like I didn’t even shower today! - You get the picture. It’s that inner voice that turns every little bump into a mountain of criticism.

            In the end I thought our video came out great, better than that inner voice was telling me it would be. We had a week to brain-storm and come up with an idea and script to create a promotional video for the program we are in. Once in class we hashed out our story-board, tweaked the script and set off to film. In less than three hours it was done and submitted. We chose to focus on good teaching design versus bad teaching design, and I thought we presented it in a very creative way with a subtle positive result for our ending. The whole project was for a way for us as students to practice our sixth design principle, students as designers.

            For me to have ownership in my own learning had a tremendous impact on me. It showed me that by turning on my creativity, creating whatever we could think of, carried the knowledge of what I’ve learned in the class into a deeper more secure part of my brain. As if that spark of creativity lit-up the dark regions of my brain and the light pushed that knowledge down into the folds and crevasses. I don’t know what turned-on for the others in my group, but for me it was the opportunity to be creative, to help write a script, story-board, and film that got me going. It was something powerful and something that powerful shouldn’t be missing from the schools we send our children to.

            This week we not only learned about ‘Students as Designers’ we were also presented with principles to help us as ‘Teachers as Designers’ not to fall into the trap of limited views and formulaic routines in our design practice. In reading the ‘The Creative Spirit of Design’ article by Jason K. McDonald we get three characteristics that instructional designers (in our case, teachers) can use that will help us to stay out of the unproductive ditch of procedure or formula. The characteristics are imagination, being creation-oriented, and inter-disciplinary action. Using our imagination to imagine that which yet does not exist, and to consider the world as it could be. Being creation-oriented means to be in a continual cycle of creating by spending time in creation activities like prototyping concepts or scenarios. Inter-disciplinary action is collaborating with other people in separate fields or specialties, therefore gaining a different perception than your own. These three principles help designers create effective and innovative instruction by helping those designers by being flexible, able to adapt easily, and by being perceptive, able to carefully examine situational nuances. These are what keep good designers out of the ditch and on the road to effective, innovative instruction.

            I think all three of these principles McDonald points out are great, but I am pulled more to the inter-disciplinary one. For the mere fact that I like to be around people who are different or in a different field than I am in. In high-school I was chosen ‘friendliest’ as my senior superlative – I think in part because I had friends in all the different ‘cliques.’ I could hang out with the jocks one day and the thespians the next day. I enjoyed being situated in either of their cultures. I believe there is real value in having an appreciation for how others view the world. Now if I could just work on that inner voice who views how I appear on camera…

The Means Principle and Affordance Analysis

The Means Principle and Affordance Analysis

            Have you ever used the back-end of a flashlight to nail up a picture hanger? Or maybe you’ve tried using a coin to loosen or tighten a screw? In a pinch I have, with mixed results. It may take you three times as long to get that screw out or you may smash your finger and scratch up a decent flashlight in the process, but it gets the job done. Yes in a rush we can make do with what’s laying around, but is it best practice? It doesn’t really matter in our day to day affairs around the house whether or not we find the right tool for such trivial dabblings, but when we look at our jobs of educating our youth I think it is beneficial to take our time to find the right tool to use in our learning goal. This week we learned our fifth design principle which is the Means principle. This principle is: Good learning designs reflect technologies chosen after mindful consideration of the cognitive and societal consequences as well as a clear and appropriate connection with content and learning activities. To help us implement this principle in our own teaching designs we also learned the design process of the Affordance analysis. To help us hone our Affordance analysis skills we worked with a ‘considering affordance’ worksheet which helped us choose the right technologies for the learning outcomes we were seeking. We also worked through another sheet which allowed us to match the learning goal to the right tool (technology). These, for me helped synthesize what our fifth design principle is about. It not only forced me to take in the mindful consideration of which technology to use but it also helped me to crystalize what my final learning goal will be before I even start with planning a lesson. Both extremely helpful.

            On paper I’m the ‘Technology teacher’ at my school. I fill a couple of other rolls there as well, but when it comes to direct interactions with our students I’m the ‘technology teacher.’ They all come to the Tech lab, my room, to “learn technology.” Which after going through the first six of this course makes saying what I do that way seem silly. We are always learning and absorbing the content of the culture we are situated in, especially children. They’re such brilliant little detectives that most times if you hand them a new ‘technology’ they’ll figure it out before you do. So going through this course is teaching me that I’m not teaching technology, but that technology is there as a tool to help our students learn, not just how to use that technology, but to learn content, processes, theories, conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and what it means to know something. In six weeks, in this first class I’ve used an iPad to search a database, I’ve used my phone to take pictures and merge those pictures into a Word doc, I’ve created an online Kahoot quiz, I’ve used a QR code reader, collaboratively written poetry and a comprehensive treatment for a promotional video, played with and explored uses of an Ozobot as well as the Osmos, and I have created and kept this blog page going as well. The learning of the technologies involved I just mentioned just happened. We weren’t tasked with ‘today you will learn how to create a Kahoot quiz’, our goal for this whole course of ‘Designing for Information Using’ is driving the use of these great tools. The tools are situated in a way that we’re using them and learning them all the while we’re driving to our overall learning goal for this course. It really has been eye opening to me. It’s making me rethink and redesign my role as ‘technology teacher’ at my school and will hopefully open the door to me bringing this information to our classroom teachers to benefit all of the learners at our school.

            We are learning how to be designers, teachers as designers. Learning this fifth design principle of the Means Principle was important for me to see that technology is a very useful tool, but that we must carefully consider which technology we use depending on what our overall learning goal is. We shouldn’t just use what’s laying around, but have a learning purpose for the technologies we use.

The Victorian Internet

The Victorian Internet

By Tom Standage

(A review – by Jim Field)

            The Victorian Internet, published in 1997, tells of the momentous story of the rise of the telegraph and the early pioneers who crafted a new technology into a world changing industry.  It covers the dawn of a robust period in the history of human communication that is continuing to be felt to this day and touches on its rather rapid decline. While Alexander Bell initially set out to improve the telegraph, his telephone quickly replaced the telegraph along with its community, customs, and subculture, yet we still see the foundations that were laid down by the telegraph in our communications with each other today. The internet and email, mobile phones and texting all carry forward the basic principles of what the telegraph accomplished in opening near instantaneous communications with people half-way around the globe. It was inspiring to read of inventors and enterprising men who set upon an idea and went to work crafting the reality of that amazing thought. They toiled through plenty of nay-sayers and through insurmountable set-backs to usher in a new age of human communication. Yet in the face of the people who said it could never be done, these men progressed their inventions far enough and sold the dream well enough that other men with greater monetary means took a chance and financed these unattainable feats.

“The possible’s slow fuse is lit by the Imagination”

-         Emily Dickinson

         

          The book also covers the many similarities between the telegraph and the internet, how in the early days so much optimism swirled around the utopian means that these new technologies could lead to greater world peace, and for as much good people can use them for there will always be bad characters who use them as a vehicle to cheat, steal, swindle and harm others with.

           

            Thinking of what I’ve learned from this book and how it might impact my practice of teaching, I believe what I will most take away is the dedication these men had towards advancing the technologies they invented or the technologies that were around them. How a person’s drive and ambition can conquer the impossible mountain peaks that other’s say can’t be reached will help me to look at my students as engines full of massive amounts of potential. I need to seek out and prod for what motivates them, or if they are so beaten down by past failures or other external factors I need to find a way to spark their imaginations so that they can tap that desire to conquer whatever mountain seems impossible to them. We’re not all going to invent something as great as the telegraph but if I can show them that they can use the grit that’s inside of us all, to achieve a goal - then I have communicated a message that I wanted them to receive.

Vygotsky and Meaningful Learning

Vygotsky and Meaningful Learning

  

            We were warned that Vygotsky’s Mind in Society was going to be a hard read, the second hardest book we’ll read this semester, as it was put to us. It gave me pause when the two quotes at the beginning of the book are from Karl Marx and his partner, Friedrich Engels. Sure, reading a book from one of Russia’s most influential psychologist, with quotes from the father of communism is going to be no problem for a free thinking American such as myself, I thought sarcastically. Much to my delight the book focused solely on the science of Vygotsky’s pioneering in developmental psychology. I found myself diving deeper into trying to understand the principles and theories he sets forth. Quite honestly I began to have more questions as I found myself agreeing with his analytic summations. Questions which I will lay out here.

            I also found a greater appreciation of speech and language, the very thing that separates us from the animals. I found myself listening to conversations differently, listening to my children differently, and listening to the how and why of what my wife was trying to communicate to me through language. Speech really is a special way in which we can connect with other humans, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly – to converse and share our thoughts and feelings, ideas and dreams, hurts and disappointments, not only through speech but through these symbols we call letters so that what we write can be read by many more people than we would ever to be able to speak to, and then these letters and words and sentences can last for years beyond that convey a message that is so uniquely yours, it’s beautiful to think about. It really is such a uniquely human treasure that should be cherished more than the rarest gems in the world. Connecting through speech is truly what defines us as human.  

            The main topics we learned reading Mind in Society are as follows: symbols, tools, cognition, internalization, complex thinking, development, and play. Symbols and intellectual tools are the intermediaries between ourselves and the world. They allow our cognition; memory, attention, ability to categorize, and our perception. By appropriating symbols and internalizing them we’re able make sense of what’s around us. Leading us to complex thinking or high order thinking, where we are not just taking visual clues that are in front of us and reacting to them but we are putting deep thought into independent and deliberate action. The zone of proximal development is the area, or window between actual development, where our readiness, desire and motivation have gotten us to and our potential level of development with guidance from an adult or more capable peer. Finally play, where children go mentally, to figure out how things work, and how they can play with the “rules” that they are situated in in their culture.

            Most of my questions came from the culture I’m situated in, I am a father to three children and I work in a special needs school.

            On page 29 I read the following “…young children are likely to fuse action and speech when responding to both objects and social beings. This fusion of activity is analogous to syncretism in perception…”  My question to this: What of the autistic brain? If signs and words serve children first as a means of social contact with other people, does this account for the lack of social interaction of autistic children?

            The beginning of chapter 2, linking tool use and speech which is a dynamic system of behavior, where does ADHD come into play? Is there some disconnect between this link that allows for or manifest itself as ADHD?

            Chapter 3, the section on ‘social origins of indirect memory’ and the page 39 quote “…the central feature is self-generated stimulation, that is, the creation and sue of artificial stimuli which become the immediate causes of behavior” and the thought of children creating sign operation/meaning lead me to ask is this why a therapist using external aides, such as stuffed animals, to help children to verbalize their thoughts, feelings, traumas, etc… is such an effective tool?

            Also in chapter 3 from the studies on page 48 and 49 measuring pictures as memory aides leads me to ask where does short-term memory recall fall in the measurement of overall intelligence.

            On page 51 in reference to tying a knot on a handkerchief as a reminder, as in a physical aide, does that translate to sports, such as physical objects as performance enhancers, fans put on ‘rally-caps’, athletes have routines or superstitions, or an athlete will blame a bad performance on his shoes or the lighting? Physical objects as either the cause or blame for a performance.

            Onto chapter 4, do we now have better, more comprehensive experimentation methods for higher psychological functions as the S—R methods are limited to elementary psychological functions? The t.v. show Brain Games comes to mind.

            Page 71 tests of increasing choice reaction to stimuli games, how does short-term memory/sign assignment process relate to our overall behavior?

            Page 81 and the assertion from Thorndike that mastery of specific skills and materials does not correlate to mastery of other specific skills, How is this relevant, or how does it translate to autistic/Asperger children who are single focused? Or does it not?

            Chapter 7 covers play and the importance of it to the development of children’s high order thinking, what damage to ‘play’ is being done by handing children phones, or electronic devices to keep their attention, or to keep them quiet?

            In conclusion, as I ask how will what I’ve learned from Vygotsky impact my practice, I think not only of my practice but how it will affect my fathering. I think of children’s play and how their imaginations need the room to run and test and explore, and how I as an educator and a father need to facilitate that more by not only limiting time in front of a device but also by engaging in that imaginative play – a box becomes a car, a stick becomes light-saber, a hand gesture becomes a force-field. I need to become more cognizant of the power of imaginative play. In terms of the zone of proximal development I think I can foster more collaborative projects and provide opportunities for students to work together. So much of our focus is on individualized programs for our students and the accommodations they need as an individual I tend to lose focus on the mutual benefit of joint task and joint learning. I will try to carry with me the appreciation of language as symbols and tools and not try to focus on the words that are coming at me but to try to process what is trying to be communicated to me.

            This course is making me think and forcing my mind to expand by soaking up a lot of great information but most of all it is helping me to think, really think about my practice of teaching. I describe it as mindfulness in educating, we are taking into consideration the weight of the lesson, or principle, or theme, or theory we are trying to teach and then we are to tear it down to get at what ‘it’ really is. Then using our design principles we construct authentic activities, knowledge building activities, constructing activities and finally sharing activities. Now with Vygotsky we need to provide play that’ll lead to higher thinking. With our mindfulness in educating we’re not filling up vessels with inert knowledge but we are to fill our students with the fuel to reach their potential.