Libraries are cool; students should get to explore them

My son Ben recently asked me how people learned to fly.  We live in North Carolina, and our license plates advertise that we are “First in Flight,” referring to Orville and Wilbur’s famous 1903 flight in Kitty Hawk, NC.

I thought it would be cool for Ben to see a book about the Wright Brothers, so I looked in the Durham Public Library.  Surprisingly, there were not many books on the shelves about the famous brothers (perhaps I looked in the wrong section), but I did find this book:

It’s not about what I thought it would be about.  It mentions that the Wright Brothers first flew in December of 1903 and that they became famous around the world.

But the rest of the book is all about what happened six years later, in 1909, when Wilbur flew over New York City.  Here’s a short excerpt from the first pages of the book:

I’d never heard of this two-week party before — it fascinated me.  So I took the time to satisfy my own curiosity and read more of the book.

I learned that in 1909, New York was the second largest city in the world (to London), and that it was a melting pot.  According to the book I found by chance in the library, here are more details about New York in 1909:

A quick online search took me to the Wikipedia Page for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, as well as a page on a New York City history website called The Bowery Boys.  Here’s a quote from the second source, describing the two-week party:

A state-wide soiree, it was New York’s own unofficial world’s fair, a chance to trumpet its innovations and riches via a celebration of its history and the central role of the Hudson River.

Make no mistake: as much as this was a celebration of New York, it was also a celebration of New York’s wealthy. This was the height of the Gilded Age, after all. The original plan was forged by Theodore Roosevelt’s uncle Robert, and the planning committee included Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, former vice president Levi Morton, Macys co-owner Oscar Straus, and members of the Rockefeller and Van Rensselaer families. They were celebrating New York; by extension, they were celebrating themselves.

So now, having started with a look for the basics about the Wright Brothers (which I could have found on Wikipedia), my foray into the library led me to learn about a very cool Gilded Age period in New York City’s history that I’d never heard of before.

So libraries are cool.  Browsing the stacks to find related books is a fun thing to do, and can often yield surprising and valuable results.  Online searching is a good skill to develop, but there are times when books — and libraries — are the way to go.

But here’s the sad thing — most students don’t get time to explore the stacks. The curriculum and the lesson plans won’t allow for it.

Imagine a class of students who had been assigned by their teacher to learn about the Wright Brothers and how they flew for the first time.  If a student had found the book I found, Touching The Sky, he/she likely would have determined that it was not “on topic” and would have looked for a more “on topic” book.

Worse yet, the teacher might have made the “on topic” determination in advance, by selecting the “most appropriate” books and arranging those books on a cart, so students in all five of the teacher’s classes could have easy access to the same materials.

What we need is more individualized instruction that lets curious students have time to wander around and find something that they connect with and want to learn more about.

I’m fascinated with the idea that New York closed down for two weeks of celebrations.  I want to learn more about that time period, and I might even pull some primary resources, such as newspaper accounts of that week.

Libraries are cool, and we have to design learning environments so that students have the opportunity (and the time) to explore libraries in all of their coolness.

This does not mean students would not learn to write a paper — it just means the student might actually write a paper about something he/she cares about more than the Wright Brothers, such as New York’s big party in 1909.

P.S.  Ben also wants to know when the first paper airplanes were made.  I told him I imagined it would not be until paper became inexpensive, so some time after the industrial revolution.  I’m not sure when paper airplanes became common.

Again, a quick Wikipedia search about paper airplanes points me in the right (or should I say wright?) direction:

[The Wright Brothers] built numerous paper models, and tested them within their wind tunnel. By observing the forces produced by flexing the heavy paper models within the wind tunnel, the Wrights determined that control through flight surfaces by warping would be most effective, and in action identical to the later hinged aileron and elevator surfaces used today. Their paper models were very important in the process of moving on to progressively larger models, kites, gliders and ultimately on to the powered Flyer…

It would be fun to go back to the library to see what’s on the stacks in the paper airplanes section

P.P.S.  My wife just tipped me off that a little less than a month ago, on March 21, 2012, the world’s largest paper airplane flew for six seconds in Arizona.  Wives are cool, too.  Even cooler than libraries…

Librarians everywhere

My son Ben and I just finished Gmail chatting with his former nanny (now a librarian), and Ben wondered why she would be online at the library — he concluded that it was because she must be waiting for people to email her with questions.

Diligent as our former nanny is, I’m betting that she was not logging on to Gmail to await questions from far-away library patrons.  She was almost certainly logging on to check her email because it was a slow moment at the library.

But Ben is right — librarians should have more of a virtual presence.  If we were doing things right, people everywhere would be in ridiculously long virtual lines, waiting to ask librarians all sorts of questions — because librarians can help you find information and learn.

What an archaic notion that the only place people can speak to librarians is in the library.  Increasingly, libraries themselves are virtual.  When I was teaching, I could access the databases in my school’s library from anywhere in the world.

If we extend this logic, it’s a similarly archaic notion that the only place people can learn from teachers is in school.  Indeed, Will Richardson has argued that he wants his children to be found by strangers online… so that his children can learn from strangers.

If Will is right (and he is), we need to re-think “school” (which I’m doing — you can read about the details of my new middle school, called Triangle Learning Community) and we also need to rethink “library.”

Our former nanny is an amazing resource — wouldn’t we want our children (and our adult who have questions about any topic) to consult her first, rather than run blindly to Google for results that might or might not be productive?  Or go to Wikipedia first, get some background information, form some questions, and then email your librarian who can point you in the right direction.

Thanks, Ben, for helping me realize that librarians really are everywhere, and they should be logging on to Gmail so that people from all over the world can email them questions and learn.

Learning from Twitter — content and process

Here’s an example of a couple of things I learned this morning from Twitter…

First, on the content front, I learned from my friend Marc Lynch — a professor at GWU and an expert on the Middle East who just published a book titled The Arab Uprising – that there’s a good piece in the Wall Street Journal today about the Arab media. I also learned that Marc is having trouble accessing that article, because the content is behind a pay wall, available only to subscribers to the Wall Street Journal.

Marc asked his followers on Twitter (he has more than 13,000 followers, including people such as Nicholas Kristof and Clay Shirky)

if someone could send him the full text of the WSJ article…

If you look at the bottom of the screen shot of Marc’s twitter stream (pasted below) you will see that he posted that request 38 minutes ago.  And if you look at the top of the screen shot, you will see that 34 minutes ago (i.e., within four minutes), someone read his tweet and sent him not only the article itself but a method for getting articles from the WSJ for free in the future.

This is what Marc probably got when he first tried, as a non-subscriber, to get into the Wall Street Journal:

And now, thanks to @FelixPax, Marc gets this:

 

And the key is to do this:

But I also learned that a top scholar is frustrated that the Wall Street Journal is making it harder for people to access its content.

In a related move, I’m sad to report that the New York Times will start restricting the number of free articles non-subscribers can see per month.  It used to be 20 per month and soon it will be down to 10. I’m not sure if the same sort of work-around will work for the NYT.

As someone looking to open a middle school that will encourage students to read and discuss sophisticated news sources on a daily basis, I’m saddened that institutions such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times make it difficult for students who don’t much money to access their content.

I’m hoping similar news agencies that currently allow free access to their content (LA Times, NPR, BBC) do not follow suit.

I’m also intrigued that one of the top scholars of the Middle East was frustrated this morning because of the Wall Street Journal’s policy, and I’m further intrigued that Twitter helped him solve that access problem within four minutes

Go Twitter!

Oh, and getting back to content, you should read that article Marc recommended abut the Arab Media Clash Over Syria (that’s the link that will work).  It is a good read, and it ends by quoting a UPenn scholar, who makes the point that:

“When we engage in this rhetoric whereby the other side is only good when dead,” said the University of Pennsylvania’s Mr. Kraidy, “we are setting the region up for a lot of trouble.”

 

Tweet and retweet

With my friend Jeff Delp’s permission, I’m sharing an exchange we just had over Twitter that provides yet another reason for using Twitter — it is a great way to share resources and have a quick conversation with people you know:

I read a great job description on my email, and because I’m the sort of person who shares cool things I come across, I tweeted this:

(on Twitter, it’s okay to spell words wrong — the idea is to get your message across in 140 characters or less)

When you want to direct a public tweet to someone, you use the @ sign, followed (without a space) by the person’s Twitter name.

And then Jeff and I went into direct message mode so that we could coordinate a time to catch up next week.  Nobody can see a direct message you send to someone else on Twitter.  It’s a private communication, whereas our main tweets are public.

Note that you can only direct message with someone who’s following you on Twitter.  Jeff and I already follow each other, so it was no problem.

Here’s our exchange:

Twitter is a great tool for connecting with busy educators.

I’ve also written about the value of Twitter in three earlier blog posts:

• Why you should use Twitter,
• To Tweet or Not to Tweet?, and
• Participating virtually at a sold-out show

So please, if you are still thinking about Twitter, give it a shot.  Soon you, too, will be tweeting, retweeting, and connecting with the world

Empathizing with Baba Amr (wherever that is)

If you have been following the news out of Syria, there’s some awful stuff happening in the Baba Amr neighborhood of the city of Homs.

But where is Homs?  Could you picture it on a map?  How many people live there?

And where is the Baba Amr neighborhood?

If we can’t picture the place, I think it’s easy to read an article about Syria without slowing down to empathize. Try it — read these sentences, excerpted from this lead article in Friday afternoon’s New York Times about Syria:

…unconfirmed reports [said] that Syrian security forces were conducting house-to-house searches and summary executions in the neighborhood, Baba Amr, while the convoy of seven Red Cross trucks was parked at the edge of the neighborhood, where military sentries refused to grant it entry despite having received official approval 24 hours earlier. It was unclear why the Syrian military had blocked the convoy.

Got that picture? There is a convoy of seven Red Cross trucks filled with food and medical supplies for people who have been sealed off from the rest of the city for nearly a month. Children are starving and there are no well-equipped hospitals.

The military is in complete control of the area, and the military is refusing to let in the convoy — possibly because the military is going house-to-house so it can kill people in Babr Amr.

Why would Syria do this? To teach the folks in Baba Amr a lesson — quit protesting and calling for President Bashar al-Assad to step down.

If you are having trouble picturing Baba Amr, it’s not your fault — the US media is doing a poor job of helping us empathize.

Here’s a seven minute video I just made that may help — it’s an example of how Google Earth can help us slow down and better empathize with people half way across the world — it’s a lesson that when we hear about awful things going on in Baba Amr, we should wonder where it is…

Skyping in to Detroit to talk current events

On Tuesday, I had the privilege of being a guest teacher for nearly an hour in a fifth grade classroom, where we started to discuss what’s going on in Syria.

What makes this particularly cool is that the fifth grade class is in Detroit… and I live 500 miles away, in Durham, North Carolina.

I “met” the fifth graders’ teacher, Ben Curran, because he found my blog at the beginning of this school year and he took the time to comment on a post. We started tweeting and emailing; we even scheduled a time to Skype with each other back in September, and we’ve become friends.

In addition to teaching 5th grade, Ben is also one of the curators of Engaging Educators, a fantastic blog that I read on a regular basis.  It’s worth checking out.

A few weeks ago, Ben and I wondered what it would be like for me to Skype into his classroom to try some of the current events teaching I plan to do on a regular basis with sixth grade students at the middle school I’m opening in 2013, Triangle Learning Community.

Ben and I planned on Sunday, and then I made a short 4-minute YouTube video early Monday morning as a way to introduce myself to Ben’s students (apologies if you watch it — I had a cough — but it was cool for his students to get a preview of their mystery guest). He played the video in class on Monday and then had his students read and discuss an article we selected. It was about reporter Anthony Shadid and how he died of asthma while in Syria covering the protests against the government.

His students then came up with questions, which they recorded on a Google Document that I was able to review so I had a sense of what they were thinking about before Skyping in on Tuesday.

Ben has a great account of what happened in his class on his blog.

When you do a video call on Skype, you can share your screen, and so once the students saw my face and we said hello, I switched to “share full screen” to let them see my screen projected on their computer.

As you can see, we talked for a little more than 53 minutes.

I started by showing them around Durham, where I was calling from, and then I asked them questions about their school in Detroit.  What I found fascinating was that some of Ben’s students learned — for the first time — that they live five miles from one of the largest concentrations of Muslims in the United States — Dearborn, MI.

As a result of our Google Earth session, Ben and his class may take a field trip to an Islamic Center in Dearborn.  That suggests to me that there are lots of opportunities to use Google Earth to learn more about your own neighborhood.

[Update: Ben and I set up a Google Document so we can share resources for his students to read as they follow up on Syria, and Ben just posted a link there to an article in the Detroit Free Press about how hundreds of Syrian Americans in Dearborn are rallying in SUPPORT of President al-Assad.]

Once we moved away from Detroit and over to Syria, we started empathizing with the people who live there. I showed the students some of the cities that have been under attack, and I showed them a picture of Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria. We then read the blurb about Assad from Wikipedia:

I asked them why they thought he ran unopposed in the elections in 2000 and 2007.  They first wondered if he was very popular because he took over from his father, but then they saw his father was a dictator.

We did a sort of role play, where I asked for volunteers to stand up to run against Assad. Each time someone volunteered, I explained that the volunteer – along with his/her family would be killed as an example of what happened to people who wanted to oppose my government. We did this a few times and they soon “got” what happens to people who dare to oppose President Assad.

I explained that I was exaggerating a bit, but not by much.  That explained why he runs unopposed.

Our conversation moved to a discussion of what you could do if you lived under such conditions, and some students said they would leave the country. We talked about how that’s happening — in a limited way — as people become “refugees” (some of them learned a new word).

Then Ben and I asked them what they thought would happen if the government let anyone leave who wanted to leave.  They got the idea that if that happened, there would not be many people left for President Assad to rule over.

I then showed them this political cartoon, and since they’d seen a picture of Assad, they got that he was the one being depicted in the cartoon.  And they were able to figure out what the cartoon was saying, just by us providing them with the primary document and asking “what do you think the cartoonist is trying to say here?”

We didn’t get into the UN or Russia’s role yet, but they got the idea that he was killing his own people — and they were confused about why that would happen.

And that was a great place to leave off — with some cognitive dissonance.  Why is this happening in Syria? [And why do some -- but not all -- Syrian Americans in Dearborn support President Assad?]

Ben’s students did a great job and seemed very focused (he set up the camera so I could see most of them on Skype), even though we went for more than 45 minutes.

Ben’s students went on break for a few days after we had our session, but when they come back on Monday, he’s going to continue following the story in Syria.  We’ll keep in touch, and I plan to Skype back in again soon.

We’re planning to have his students make an online guide that will explain what’s going on in Syria (and in the overall “Arab Spring” movement, of which Syria is a part) to young people around the world who might be curious. More as that plan develops…

But this was an incredibly cool thing to be able to do for an hour, and it suggests all sorts of possibilities for using current events as a vehicle for developing empathetic global citizens.

Don’t let HW get in the way of learning

This is an argument about why students (and teachers) should blog, and why, once we let them blog, we should give students the curricular flexibility to follow their interests and passions. When they go deeper into material they care about, they will develop their literacy and numeracy in a real-world context. The learning will be more genuine and more meaningful. They will own the learning.

I have been blogging for more than a year, and one of the benefits is that now I have enough material that I can connect unfolding events to previous blog posts I’ve written. Because I’ve been blogging, I can make more sense of events in the world.

The idea behind having middle school students at Triangle Learning Community (TLC) blog about world events for three years (6th through 8th grade) is that they will bring three years’ worth of thinking with them to high school and beyond. They will also develop the habit of paying attention to the world outside the US, which is a good thing for an empathetic global citizen to do.

So here’s the cool connection that made me appreciate my blog — and made me want to have students blog.

I was reading my friend James Kessler’s Facebook page, where he noted the senseless violence going on in Syria (about which I am deeply disturbed and about which I will blog soon):

Now one of James’ friends, Michael-Ann Kelly (who I’ve never met) asked if James is following @acarvin on Twitter.

Who’s @acarvin?  That’s easy enough to find out:

So I went to Andy Carvin’s twitter stream, and I found lots of troubling reports about Syria.

But also in his stream, I found this reference to Wael Ghonim:

Why did that name mean something to me? Well, back in March of 2011, I wrote a long post about Wael Ghonim, and how amazing it was that I was able to follow current events as they were unfolding in Egypt.

Here’s an excerpt from my earlier blog entry:

Now let’s just think about how incredibly cool this is — he’s in Cairo, Egypt.  And he gave a speech at a TED talk in Cairo.  In MARCH.  And I got an email on March 9, opened it, read it early in the morning, clicked on the link, and started learning from Wael Ghonim. I mean, this sort of thing simply wasn’t possible when I was growing up.  We read history in the textbook, which was written several years earlier.  Now, we can access primary sources that allow us to think about events as they happen:

On a second look, we don’t just want students to think about events as they happen — we want them to get active and put those events into context, by using such tools as Google Earth to locate Egypt and by conducting online research to do what I call Applied History.

But the point here is that my earlier blog post about Wael Ghonim became a part of me in ways that I fear most students’ study of history and/or current events does not often become a part of them.

My investment in blogging about Wael Ghonim’s story 11 months ago makes me want to listen to this NPR story (pictured below) Well, maybe not all of it since it’s 38 minutes long — I’ll likely listen to the first 5 minutes to get the sense of it and hear Wael Ghonim’s voice…   Then I’ll go back and read the transcript once it’s made available online in a few days:

Apparently, Ghonim has written a book about his experience.  As you can see from the highlighted portion below, he felt like he had to do something, so he started a Facebook page to dramatize the killing of Khaled Said. He was anonymous when he started the page, but Egyptian officials figured out who he was. Shortly after that, they  kidnapped him.

This is gripping stuff.

Imagine being a middle school student who followed this story back in March. Imagine now wanting to follow-up, but not having time to do so because you are swamped with homework.

Imagine if you had the flexibility to pursue your passion. At TLC, students will learn how to assign themselves homework. They will also spell out the rationale for that HW so everyone is clear about why they are reading that play or working on that math problem.

This means that a TLC student in my position — one who was following events in Egypt — could give herself the homework assignment of reading Wael Ghonim’s new book over the next week. As she read, she would blog about sections of the book that the student found most compelling. When she finished, she might write a review of the book and post it on Amazon.

Many students are passionate about events they learn about, but are stuck doing their teacher’s homework. We need to mentor students so that they are able to learn on their own, and then we need to trust students enough to let them blog about events they care about. Then we need to allow them to follow-up and learn more.

I just watched a great video by Alan November, who says early in the video that the one question he asks when he wants to determine whether a school is a good one or a great one is this:

Who owns the learning?

If it’s the teachers who own the learning (and the curriculum) — if the teachers are working harder than the students — then something’s wrong. The teacher’s job is to create a learning environment that make the students engage with and take ownership of their learning.

If the goal is for young people to become empathetic global citizens — which happens to be the goal of TLC — then why on earth would we stop them from getting to that objective through an unexpected route, such as following up on the Arab Spring?

We need to have students blog more, and we have to give them the flexibility to follow their curiosity wherever (within reason) their blogging may lead them.

This does not mean drop math so you can focus exclusively on Wael Ghonim. But it does mean that if the plan was to look at poetry next week, there would be enough flexibility to let that student focus on Wael Ghonim this week and catch up on poetry later.

If we did it right, the student might even be able to write some poetry about what’s going on in Egypt. She could post that poetry on her blog and we could connect her with a school in Egypt who could read her blog and comment on her work.