Entries categorized as ‘Notes’
September 15, 2007 · 3 Comments
Cool People I Met
- Joel Mark Witt
- Bre Pettis
- BrePettis.com includes links to all his current videocasts, including Make Magazine’s Weekend Projects
- Bre used to be a middle school teacher out in the Northwest: Room 132
- The blogs of Philadelphia public schools: Didn’t even realize they had a blog program
- Robert Karl (rkarl at phila.k12.pa.us) is part of the Educational Tech Group of the Philadelphia public school system and seems like a good resource for ed tech issues
- Rand Bradbury
- Can I just tell you that this guy, who’s a sound engineer for the Keswick Theater, is the best technical instructor I have ever encountered? Things that eluded me in books for years have now made perfect sense because of his brief explanations. Rand rocks.
- Roadie Show: A podcast that mostly features interviews with roadies and other backstage audio folk.
- CC Chapman
- CC Chapman’s site has links to a number of podcasts that he’s involved with, including Managing the Gray (a new media marketing podcast), Accident Hash, and U-Turn Cafe (podsafe music podcasts)
- Linda Mills
- Mark Blevis
- Another of the growing crop of new media specialists, his site is an impressive testament to his connectedness and reach within the podcasting community
- Just One More Book: podcast on children’s books
- Electric Sky: Several NPR-like interviews and exploration podcast shows
- David Tamés
- kino-eye: David’s a freelance videographer from Boston. His blog’s got some good technical ruminations on producing video.
- Jen Yuan
- A Thousand Times No is an interview podcast focusing on people who underwent a significant change or overcame devastating failure. Jen’s local, too, and really nice.
- Russ Starke and Todd Marrone
- Both contribute to Used Wigs Radio, a chat and music podcast that seems like a lot of fun. Todd’s also an amazing artist who made several art pieces for the podcamp off the cuff.
- Chris Penn
- Helped start the podcamp conferences with Chris Brogan. He has a financial advice podcast at financialaidpodcast.com
- Steve Lubetkin
- I met Steve at Blog Philadelphia, and he’s the one who let me know about Podcamp Philly. He has a company that creates professional podcasts for clients at ProfessionalPodcasts.com
Lessons Learned: Technical
Lessons Learned: Non-Technical
- Don’t be afraid to get help from people
- Podcasting community tends to be very helpful
- Get someone to teach you
- Or delegate to someone who has the passion, expertise
- Know your audience
- Consider what audience you might already have
- Involve them
- Get face-to-face with them when you can
- Old-school storytelling techniques still apply
- Go for anecdotes instead of just facts
- Look for dramatic/cinematic moments
- Create a rhythm
- Make sure you add variety, break the pattern at frequent intervals
- Plan to do multiple takes with students
- Often the best, most natural takes are the “practice” ones
- Tell the students to plan to make a mistake
- Interviews
- Don’t be in a rush to fill silences; pauses can extend conversations
- At the end ask for any afterthoughts
- What haven’t I asked you?
- Contribute, don’t dictate, the conversation
- Make mistakes on purpose, or take a confrontational stance, to catalyze feedback
- Be a brand; sell a lifestyle
- Consider other distribution channels
- Example: Maryland Zoo TV gets shown on cable
- Mind TV is a Philly site that will show uploaded 5-minute video clips on cable.
- Apply for grants
- Example: Best Buy > Community Relations > Grant (given once or twice a year)
Sites of Interest that Came Up
Red Lasso allows you to clip commercial media (news, entertainment, sports) and share and embed them without intellectual property violations. This seems like a great way to share current media with my classrooms. And it’s a local King of Prussia company.
Viddler allows you, not only to upload videos and share them, but also comment on them within the timeline of the video. A very cool feature and another great local company. I just wish they were supported by WordPress.com.
Bre Pettis gave a great tip for doing 30-second low-tech podcasts: Use K7.net, which is a free service that sends voice messages to your email. The phone numbers seem local only to Seattle, though. PrivatePhone seems like another free alternative — it’s affiliated with NetZero. ureach.com or (GotVoice)(http://gotvoice.com) are paid services that also do the same thing (with more features).
Pods & Blogs is a BBC-produced hour-long weekly podcast that takes measure of the news as seen through the lens of social media and the blogosphere.
Sound About Philly features podcast tours of Philly.
One way to announce your podcast to strangers is to add it to Podcast 411’s directory. I also found out about a UK podcast directory for educators
Somebody recommended the CLIP Podcast as an interesting show that looks at critical literacies in different spaces.
Libsyn came highly recommended as a paid podcasting host. They charge by storage and not by audience size, so they’re ideal for growing an ever expanding listener base.
From Idea to Air is Tod Maffin’s e-book on creating and pitching radio segments to public radio.
Radio: An Illustrated Guide is an informative comic book on producing for radio, which can be bought on the This American Life store.
Categories: Blogging · Notes
September 3, 2007 · 1 Comment
Reread Malcolm Gladwell’s _Blink_ and took some notes after I hunted in it for some anecdotes about first impressions for my classes.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2005.
- Introduction: The Statue That Didn’t Look Right
- Fast and Frugal
- U of Iowa card game experiment: picking between red (high stakes) vs blue (moderate, steady gains) decks
- Two different strategies of thinking
- conscious strategy: logical, definitive, slow, needs lots of information
- adaptive unconscious: quicker, reaches conclusions unconsciously
- The Internal Computer
- we move back and forth between conscious and unconscious modes of thinking,
depending on the situation
- Nalini Ambadi: judging the professor in 10, 5, 2 seconds
- Three themes in the book:
- Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately
- When should we trust our instincts, and when should we be wary of them?
- Our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled
- A Different and Better World
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The Theory of Thin Slices: How a Little Bit of Knowledge Goes a Long Way
- Thin-slicing: the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.
- British interceptors in WW II analyzing Morse code “fists”
- a distinctive signature/style unique to each Morse code operator
- emerges naturally
- reveals itself in even the smallest sample
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The Love Lab: John Gottman analyzing videotapes of couples in contention
- Gottman has found he only needs to focus on the Four Horsemen:
- defensiveness
- stonewalling (favorite of men)
- criticism (favorite of women)
- contempt
- especially contempt: putting yourself on a superior plane
- completely rejecting/excluding someone from the community
- universal across men and women
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Samuel Gosling’s study of dorm bedrooms
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Analyzing the likelihood of doctors to get sued
the risk of being sued for malpractice has very little to do with how many mistakes a doctor makes…. In other words, patients don’t file lawsuits because they’ve been harmed by shoddy medical care. Patients file lawsuits because they’ve been harmed by shoddy medical care and … how they were treated, on a personal level, by their doctor. (40)
- Wendy Levinson recording conversations between physicians and patients
- characteristics of surgeons who had never been sued
- spent 3 minutes longer with each patient
- made more “orienting” comments (“First I’ll examine you, and then we will talk the problem over”)
- more likely to engage in active listening
- more likely to laugh and be funny
- no difference in amount or quality of information given to patients
- Nalini Ambady took Levinson’s conversations and altered to erase content but keep intonation, pitch, rhythm
- judges rated for qualities as warmth, hostility, dominance, anxiousness
- dominant (sounding) surgeons in sued group
- less dominant, more concerned were in non-sued group
- The Power of the Glance
- in basketball: court-sense
- in military battle: coup d’oeil
- in bird watching: giss
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The Locked Door: The Secret Life of Snap Decisions
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The Warren Harding Error: Why We Fall for Tall, Dark, and Handsome Men
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Paul Van Riper’s Big Victory: Creating Structure for Spontaneity
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Kenna’s Dilemma: The Right — and Wrong — Way to Ask People What They Want
- Why do the aficionados love Kenna but not the focus groups?
- Pepsi’s Challenge
- Pepsi better designed for the sip test rather than a home-use test
- blind-taste test — but nobody drinks Coke blind
- Louis Cheskin - sensation transference
- unconsciously, we don’t distinguish between package and product; the product is the package and the product combined
- adding foil and yellow to Imperial Margarine
- thin-slicing has to be done in context
- “The Chair of Death”: Herman Miller’s fight for the Aeron
- people misinterpret their own feelings
- especially inaccurate with something that is truly revolutionary
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The Gift of Expertise
The first impressions of experts are different. By that I don’t mean that experts like different things than the rest of us — although that is undeniable. When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex. What I mean is that it is really only experts who are able to reliably account for their reactions. (179)
- Schooler: explaining our non-expert reactions can actually skew our impressions/judgment
What he was building, in those nights in the storerooms, was a kind of database in his unconscious. He was learning how to match the feeling he had about an object with what was formally understood about its style and background and value. Whenever we have something that we are good at — something we care about — that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions. (184)
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Seven Seconds in the Bronx: The Delicate Art of Mind Reading
- Listening with Your Eyes: The Lessons of Blink
- A Revolution in Classical Music
- the hiring of women musicians in classical music with the advent of screens for anonymous auditions
Categories: Notes · Recommended reading
September 1, 2007 · 1 Comment
Palmer, Parker. “Good Teaching: A Matter of Living the Mystery.”
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Introduction
Good teaching is an act of generosity, a whim of the wanton muse, a craft that may grow with practice, and always risky business. It is, to speak plainly, a maddening mystery. How can I explain the wild variety of teachers who have incited me to learn — from one whose lectures were tropical downpours that drowned out most other comments, to one who created an arid silence by walking into class and asking, “Any questions?”
Good teaching cannot be equated with technique. It comes from the integrity of the teacher, from his or her relation to subject and students, from the capricious chemistry of it all. A method that lights one class afire extinguishes another. An approach that bores one student changes another’s life.
Faculty and administrators who encourage talk about teaching despite its vagaries are treasures among us. Too many educators respond to the mystery either by privatizing teaching or promoting a technical “fix.” The first group uses the variability of good teaching as an excuse to avoid discussing it in public — thus evading criticism or challenge. The second group tries to flatten the variations by insisting on the superiority of this or that method or subtlety. In both quarters, [?] the far-ranging conversation that could illumine the mystery when we think of it as a “black box,” something opaque and impenetrable that we must either avoid or manipulate by main force. Mystery is a primal and powerful human experience that can neither be ignored nor reduced to formula. To learn from mystery, we must enter with all our faculties alert, ready to laugh as well as groan, able to “live the question” rather than demand a final answer. When we enter into mystery this way, we will find the mystery entering us, and our lives are challenged and changed.
Good teachers dwell in the mystery of good teaching until it dwells in them. As they explore it alone and with others, the insight and energy of mystery begins to inform and animate their work. They discover and develop methods of teaching that emerge from their own integrity — but they never reduce their teaching to technique.
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The Transaction Called Knowing
- objective knowledge vs knowledge as conversation
The only objective knowledge we have is the provisional outcome of a complex transaction in which many subjectivities check and balance each other. It is a fluid process of observation and interpretation, of consensus and dissent, conducted within a far-flung community of seekers who agree upon certain assumptions, rules, procedures — many of which are themselves up for debate. This, I think, is an image of objectivity that is faithful to the way we know. It is also an image that clarifies the goal of good teaching: to draw students into the process, the community, of knowing.
objectivity at its best is a commitment to critical discourse
- critical thinking is also a conversation (an internal one)
- On Content and “Covering the Field”
- Instead of teaching facts, have them available on print as a reference
- Using facts as case studies (texts) to teach from
When we deliver the facts on paper, we free the classroom for various exercises in generating facts, understanding facts, using facts, seeing through the facts — exercises that might draw our students into the community of truth. One such approach I call “teaching from the microcosm.”
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The Autobiographical Connection
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embracing multicultural, multi-perspectival viewpoints
The authentically educated person is one who can both embrace and transcend the particularity of his or her story because it has been triangulated many times from the stand points of other stories, other disciplines — a process that enriches the disciplines as well.
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making learning personally relevant
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showing how the learning was relevant to us as teachers
We teachers can also show students how the ideas we care about are related to our own life stories.
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showing the subjectivity behind knowledge
the major ideas at the heart of every discipline arose from the real life of a real person — not from the mind alone, but from the thinker’s psyche, body, relationships, passions, political and social context.
good teachers help students see the persons behind the ideas, persons whose ideas often arose in response to some great suffering or hope that is with us still today
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“Hearing Students into Speech”
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silence a symptom of disempowerment
the silent one is understood as the victim of a system that denies his or her story, that ignores or punishes people who tell tales that threaten the standard version of the truth
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honor minority viewpoints
- more interactivity, questioning
- respecting responses
- a few students dominating discussion: allow each student only three chances to speak
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an activity for controversial topics:
With smaller classes, when a divisive issue is up for debate and my students retreat into privatism, I sometimes give each of them a 3×5 card and ask that he or she write a few lines expressing a personal opinion on the issues. I collect the cards and redistribute them so that no one knows whose card he or she is holding. Then I ask each student to read that card aloud and take sixty seconds to agree or disagree with what it says. By the time we have gone around the group, the issue has been aired, diversity has been exposed, the unspeakable may have been spoken, and a foundation for real conversation has been laid.
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Conflict, Competiton, and Consensus
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two kinds of conflict: competition vs consensus
Many people regard conflict as terminal rather than creative because they have experienced it in settings that are competitive rather than consensual. In competition, the purpose of conflict is to determine which few will win at the expense of the many. In consensus, everyone can win through conflict as the clash of apparent opposite gives rise to fresh, fuller truth.
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creating a safe, hospitable space for creative conflict
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showing the power of consensus through simulation:
To give my students experience of conflict in a consensual setting, I sometimes use a simulation game. The game poses a problem that individuals first solve privately. Then small groups are turned loose on the problem after being given a simple set of conflict-consensual rules — e.g., “Present your views clearly, but listen to reactions before pressing your point.” “Don’t change your mind just to achieve harmony.” “Avoid conflict-reducing techniques such as majority vote, coin-flips, bargaining.” “When stalemate comes, don’t assume that some must win while others lose; seek a solution acceptable to all members.” “Remember that consensus does not require that everyone love the solution, but only that no one be strongly opposed to it.” The rules authorize and guide the very conflict that students want to avoid.
When the game is over, individual and group solutions are scored for accuracy. If a group has followed the rules, the group score is almost always better than the average of individual scores — and it is often better than the best individual score in the group. When these results are not achieved it is often because the group failed to follow the rules. By playing the game, students learn that all of us together can be transferred from the simulated problem to the real problems we are studying.
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remind students that the conversation that determines facts and knowledge is based on sustained conflict
- The Nemesis of Evaluation
- don’t grade on a curve
- possibility: allow students to determine the weight of different aspects of the class
- lets them lead with their strengths
- let work be evaluated multiple times
- grade groups rather than individuals
- publicly evaluate and reflect on the progress of the class as it happens
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The Courage to Teach
In its original meaning, a “professor” was not someone with esoteric knowledge and technique. Instead the word referred to a person able to make a profession of faith in the midst of a dangerous world.
Categories: Notes · Teaching
