Yesterday I gave a talk to the wonderful staff of the CSBSJU libraries. I love the setting and the scale of this library, so I knew I’d enjoy the event. Even so, I got nervous as always about my talk. Did I have anything worthwhile to share? Would I keep people awake and thinking or put them to sleep? Was I using my toolkit in a way that enhanced the discussion or shut it down? I think the talk went well, I got some nice feedback from the staff, and maybe I’ll have to courage to do something similar again some time.

Getting up in front of a roomful of (essentially) strangers is something that many librarians confront every day. We are teachers, among other things. Today I came across a very helpful post by Carrie Donovan on In the Library with the Lead Pipe. She talks about being authentic in the classroom:

In his book, The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer (1998) discusses identity as the evolution of all the forces that come together to form a person, including: background, culture, experience, and anything else that shapes the self. Recognizing that we bring all of these aspects of ourselves to everything we do, including our instructional activities, is key to finding your teaching identity. Librarians have pursued neutrality for a long time in their provision of organized and accessible information and knowledge, but this philosophy does not serve us well in the classroom.

We have to find (and share) ourselves in order to convey the richness of the experiences we want our students (or audience) to grasp. Not easy, but very rewarding when we pull it off!

I love logo, it is such an easy yet powerful language. I was disappointed today to see that N’s teacher was crossing out all the Logo-related assignments in his math homework. What a waste! I wondered how hard it would be to install Logo at a school these days. As I suspected, not hard at all!

There are a number of Logo interpreters written in Java, but my favorite to date is a Logo interpreter written in JavaScript. This should run in just about any modern browser. Joshua Bell, the author of this Logo, also links to Curly Logo written in JavaScript. That one may be more appropriate for kids since it takes the trouble to appear more fun to use. Plenty of Logo without any install. Now I just wish it were being used in N’s school.

Enjoy!

The Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL) initiative was underway before I left MIT. Today it got some love from the NYT in an article about the demise of large lectures.

Here’s what it was like:

Squeezed into the rows of hard, folding wooden seats, as many as 300 freshmen anxiously took notes while the professor covered multiple blackboards with mathematical formulas and explained the principles of Newtonian mechanics and electromagnetism.

John Belcher, a space physicist who arrived at M.I.T. 38 years ago and was instrumental in introducing the new teaching method nine years ago, was considered an outstanding lecturer. He won M.I.T.’s top teaching award and rave reviews from students. And yet, as each semester progressed, attendance in his introductory physics courses fell to 50 percent, as it did, he said, for nearly all of his colleagues.

And now:

The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.

Very telling are some of the comments on Slashdot:

Personally I don’t think this is the best approach, but it certainly isn’t forgiving of a student’s absence from class.

As a side note, when I was a freshman, many of my classmates did not find the TEAL lectures to be terribly effective in teaching the material. Frequently they would go back into the video archive after class and watch recordings of the “traditional” lectures from years past to actually learn what was being taught. They just went to the TEAL lectures because they didn’t want to loose their participation credit.

MIT OpenCourseWare to the rescue! Put the old lectures online, take advantage of proximate atoms off line.

Ever since I saw it as a kid, Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxion map (the Fuller Projection) made more sense to me than any other map of the world. We have had a wonderful print of the dymaxion map framed and slowly fading on our wall for decades.

You can buy copies or play with this new online puzzle version.

We like to laugh at malformed English around the world, but what if the last laugh is on us? Andrew points to an article at Wired which describes how English is recombining with other languages, particularly asian languages, to form a new global tongue.

Any language is constantly evolving, so it’s not surprising that English, transplanted to new soil, is bearing unusual fruit. Nor is it unique that a language, spread so far from its homelands, would begin to fracture. The obvious comparison is to Latin, which broke into mutually distinct languages over hundreds of years — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian. A less familiar example is Arabic: The speakers of its myriad dialects are connected through the written language of the Koran and, more recently, through the homogenized Arabic of Al Jazeera. But what’s happening to English may be its own thing: It’s mingling with so many more local languages than Latin ever did, that it’s on a path toward a global tongue — what’s coming to be known as Panglish. Soon, when Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they’ll have to learn may be their own.

Daniel Burd, a high school student in Canada, comes up with a way to biodegrade plastic bags in just months. I wonder what “a bit of carbon dioxide” waste means, though. Still, quite an accomplishment!

Thanks to Peter for a pointer to the Neoformix site. It is full of wonderful experiments in illuminating data, especially written word, though informative visualizations. Really cool stuff, some of it created by the author, other examples gathered from around the world. Here is one example, a “document contrast diagram” for Clinton and Obama’s Super Tuesday remarks.

Update: Infosthetics may also be worth keeping an eye on.

Closing out CNI yesterday, Tara McPherson described the founding, mission, and outcomes of the journal Vectors based at USC. She sees Vectors as an expression of “multimodal humanities,” a new way of using technology to allow humanities scholars to reach past the surface of screen, manipulating the data of their argument into engaging presentations that have as much in common with the video game as they do with the traditional journal article. Vectors strives to publish only what could not possibly be published in print.

From the first screen it draws the reader into unaccustomed involvement with the “text”. Take some time for a of the gallery of articles at Vector.

A few to check out: Public Secrets shares the voices of incarcerated women and those around them, WiFi.Bedouin suggests you insert wireless signals into unexpected places, and The Stolen Time Archive immerses you in an archive of text worker artifacts.

I love O’Reilly on all kinds of levels.

First, I found as a budding technologist that their books are among the best reference books out there. No nonsense, no condescension. Just information clearly presented by people who know what they are writing about. See the perl bookshelf for an example.

Second, the publisher is a gem who works hard for open access and tries to work with his readers rather than suspect them of wrong doing.

Third, O’Reilly created a really fun magazine called Make (now joined by Craft).

And now, fourth, I discover that they have created a whole series of “head first” books that are instructive, not just reference. I spent six months teaching Alex javascript while we were in Austria and Head Start Javascript would have been the perfect companion. These books are designed for the smart person who wants to sit down and devotes some structured time to learning. While filled with humor, they still require hard work and the completion of excersizes. These are a lot like a book I used thirty (!) years ago to teach myself BASIC.

For the last year I’ve been teaching myself XHTML and CSS. Too bad I didn’t know about Head First HTML.

I had an interesting conversation with Geri, one of the teachers my son had the pleasure of working with when he was younger. Nathaniel is at a wonderful school with a year round program and multiage classrooms. Now they are thinking about moving away from the multiage classroom. Geri told me that one of the reasons for this is that they just can’t cover the state-mandated curriculum for two grades in a single classroom and give the kids fair attention.

I spent part of my grade-school education in a program called “Major Work” that was part of the Cleveland Public Schools in the 1970’s. Our Major Work classrooms were multiage (Grades 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, and the like). I loved being exposed to things the next grade was working on and having a chance to work on skills (like spelling) without the stigma of having to go to a lower-grade classroom for that brush-up. That we are crushing initiatives like this with strict “No Child Left Behind” mandates is terrible. Where is the room for teacher creativity and a child’s own pace in this system?

As I’ve thought about I’ve wondered if we have not been pursuing the wrong end of the stick. Instead of no child left behind, maybe we should be pursuing no teacher left behind. I believe that if we fill our classrooms with wonderful and creative teachers who know their stuff, the kids can’t help but learn. We don’t need to hold the kids to strict curriculum standards, we need to give teachers the tools, salary, and respect they need to become excellent at what they do.

Then, today, I came across this video from last week on the campaign trail. (Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for sharing this.)

First of all, Obama is saying many of the right things about NCLB and the way it fails kids. He does not quite discard it as fully as I would like, but then even Michael Bennet told me there were some valuable results to be found from NCLB. Maybe I’d toss the baby with the bathwater.

But keep watching: about three minutes in Obama has a “one last thing” moment that is as great as any I’ve seen Steve Jobs give. One last thing: parents have to parent. This gave me a whole new perspective on my “no teacher left behind” notion. Do parents too often leave teachers holding the bag that families should hold? What if all parents did the work Obama asks them to do in this video? How many leaders in our country are willing to ask us all to do the very hard work that Obama asks us to do in this bit of extemporaneous revival?

And note the crowd’s reaction. They were supportive when Obama took on NCLB. But they become ecstatic when he asks them all to do some work to serve our children. This is another call to service. As parents we cannot leave our teachers behind, we have to support our kids and the work that teachers are trying to do in our schools.

Getting rid of NCLB, IMHO, would also help!