A look at my webquest and some NCSS standards

I recently designed a webquest for an AP Government class, dealing with the sources of national identity in the modern world. My choice for the topic began as a matter of convenience, since I was gearing up for a well deserved vacation to Istanbul for Spring break. I was surprised however, to find how well the subject matter, and its mode of delivery, lent itself to preparing students for the future. While the meat of the discovery in the webquest actually revolved around an old fashioned seminar, its application in a modern technological medium was not merely an exercise for students, but rather an example of the role of technology in illuminating global interdependence. While the seminars explicitly discussed the role of technology in Istanbul, the use of technology to more effectively connect and share ideas, layered the lesson in a way that I had not originally planned. It turns out that some surprises are nice ones this semester.

I think one the best things that the web-quest brings home is the idea that, for things to work in the future, its going to be a more and more essential skill for people who may not like each other to work together. The premise of the entire project is the education of an individual who is willfully ignorant of the subject matter. The team must help this individual for the greater good of social justice rather than the "justice" of seeing an unqualified individual fail at the expense of two nation-states. Beyond the fantasy context of the project however, lies a much more serious application of  teamwork within the whole class and the ability to work with those across cultures. Students are placed into groups for this project and what's more are required to interview members of a sister class from Turkey through Skype. Interactions across the globe could well be an everyday occurrence in the workplaces of tomorrow, and this fact underscores the role that technology has come to play in our global interdependence. Having this kind of "work" experience in the classroom will be a tremendous help in easing them into their roles as the shape of technological interaction is created by their generation.

Further, the fact that the class are using these tools of the future, (Skype, wikis, and photostory) on the deepest of levels, as creators of meaningful, message rich context, shows them how profound these mediums can become when taken seriously. While the students address technology on the theoretical level in the seminars, discussing internet censorship in Turkey and the development of new bureaucracies such as the EU, the most important assessment of that technology comes in its use, where students connect to other human beings and have to think about the benefits and risks of that technology. In a very real way the student is acting as a de facto ambassador in this project, and he or she has the ability to send a real message with the way they handle their interview and what questions they choose to ask or avoid. Their actions have a very real impact, slight though it may be, on how a small part of another country's youngest generation, will perceive the United States for the rest of their lives.

Be more choosey

The main areas begging for reform from current constraints in educatioan revolve around content, and how where and when it is taught. Ideally, content should serve as the medium in which students gain the skills they need to succeed in the world of tomorrow, instead it has become an anchor, weighing down teachers and students to the SOLs, rote memorization, and test taking strategies. As the amount of raw information available to students continues to increase exponentially, the tether on that information becomes less and less effective. Attempting to control or decide the “important” facts that we want students to learn becomes more and more futile. (If history has shown anything, it has shown that what those in power consider important, is rarely part of the next revolution.) Students of tomorrow will learn the facts they want to learn, and the sooner we realize that the information of tomorrow will flow laterally rather than from the top down, the sooner we can begin to approach the logical reform of schools' approaches to content. As Richardson explains, “I have become a nomadic learner; I graze on knowledge. I find what I need when I need it. There is no linear curriculum to my learning, no formal structure other than the tools I use to connect to the people and sources that point me to what I need to know and learn, the same tools I use to then give back what I have discovered.”

Taking my own field of history as an example, there's more and more of it every decade, not just because of the inevitable march of time, but also because of the new information and perspectives being articulated every day. It is becoming more and more ridiculous to teach half of human history in the span of ten months. The alternative is presenting students with much more choice in what they study. A traditional obstacle to offering a wide array of history courses, is the scarcity of instructors time to deliver content. This obstacle however reveals more about the anachronistic thinking of education establishment today. Content can now be easily delivered and digested virtually and often through recorded presentations, as universities and new virtual schools have shown for some time.

The benefits of such a change with regards to management of human resources goes almost without saying. Once the educator has created, or chosen a presentation or alternate medium through which his students can receive the content, he can spend his time and his expertise of his field in actually helping students to apply that content and assessing the applications, rather than teaching and re-teaching it. Teachers can craft their virtual delivery to perfection, and students can pause and rewatch or review confusing content as much as they desire without “holding up” the rest of the class. Virtual delivery is also what students are used to in most of the content they digest already. It is silly to expect them to digest academic content in any other fashion.

This brings us to other advantages in offering a wide array of virtual study options as choices. Students are more motivated when they have control over their studies, rather than experiencing school as series of commands. This also prepares them much more fully for their own future. There will likely not be anyone telling them exactly what to study when they leave school. They will need practice in choosing their own paths as lifelong learners, and we have a country of “choosers of learning” we will have the highest probability for advances in all fields.

A final advantage is that shallow assessments of “standards of learning” can finally be cast aside. Educators and students can instead be judged by their commitment to the pursuit of knowledge. This will lead to a huge broadening of our collective knowledge base, more people studying more fields and making new discoveries, rather than everyone studying the same things and leaving things undiscovered.

What am I doing here?

As a history teacher, it is eminently important that I always have an answer at the ready for one of the most common questions of my students : “Mr. Gibson, why we gotta learn this stuff?” I will never forget the first time I was asked this, and how happy I felt that I had thought and rehearsed my answer long beforehand. I just happened to be being evaluated at the time, so I hope the ease with which my answer flowed would translate to some sort of bonus points in my salary. “We live in a democracy.” I said, “ Because a you are going to grow up and make decisions about what this country does, it is important that you understand the impacts of these decisions, that you see how decisions, ideas, and events in the past have affected past societies.” In short, a well functioning democracy depends on educated electorate.

As each day passes that statement becomes even more true than the day I actually said it. What's more, it is becoming less true of electorates and more true on its face. If knowledge is power, it is becoming more diffuse in our society, as information becomes less controlled, less centered in the hands of the powerful (such as high school history teachers). In 2025 it is going to matter less what governments do, and more what the global citizen in the street does with it.

The role of the educator, therefore, is not to simply repackage information. Tomorrow's student won't need that. By the time he is in middle school he will, hopefully, already know how to get his hands on any facts he desires within a matter of seconds. What he requires, are institutions that give him direct experience molding and shaping that knowledge into something meaningful. This is true for all subjects at all grade levels.

The challenge therefore, become engaging all students in these learning experiences, and that happens by making them related in a direct personal way to the students. One way to give issues, events and cultures human faces, is by connecting classrooms across the globe into cross cultural collaborative learning environments. Technologies such as skype already enable affordable video and audio sharing. Pairing students with classmates overseas is a way for them to work on issues their two nations share, or maybe even disagree on. Dialog at this level is perhaps where real progress can begin in long standing disagreements and global tensions. 

This is of course only one example, but the vital components are to have the students choose something to work on, some problem that affects them, and show them how they can harness knowledge to empower themselves to make a positive change in their own lives. Having students create businesses, petitions, having them participate in their community in effective self-directed ways, these are the authentic learning experiences that teachers of the future should looking to.

Yesterday Tomorrow and Us.

     When I took 11^th grade physics I recall that the days where the teacher popped in a copy of James Burke’s Connections were the days least related to content knowledge. For those of you who have never seen the series, most episodes deal with the pinball effect of change throughout history, showing how someone trying to create a better horseshoe, ended up with the invention of the telephone or something like that. The final episode of the 1978 series was titled “Yesterday, Tomorrow, and You” and dealt mainly with the question of how man will be able to live in the coming era of intense knowledge specialization, where the things that we depend on, depend on so many things that we have only the most shallow knowledge of, if we have any real knowledge of them at all.

     The episode itself ends, as you can see for yourself, with a prophetic nod to the coming revolution in information sharing which I lived through for the last thirty years.  This revolution will continue to affect all information, in every area of content we teach today in our schools. However, the fact that dates events and the rules related to my field social studies have become more accessible to my students, does not reduce the amount of information to be learned. Nor does it do anything about the continued specialization of knowledge even within a subject as simple as say, Geography. With any luck, by 2025 the raw information shared will become less important in the eyes of educators as the skills necessary to put that raw information to work for students in their everyday lives, and I’m not just talking about how to read Google maps to get home avoiding traffic.

     As  Burke demonstrated in his series, events and change in all parts of the world have always had connections to us, even in when the change caused by those connections proceeded at the pace of an nineteenth century railroad. Today however, waiting to see what changes may come is a luxury that few nations can afford. The revolution in communication is here to stay and with it, the challenge of reactions that take place in minutes rather than weeks.  Information about events unfolding in all corners of the world is now the low hanging fruit waiting to be plucked. It is rather, the skill of analysis that becomes the true content knowledge that we need students to graduate with.  Students need to understand basic political and especially economic reactions that occur on this stage. 

     This is not to say that a shared foundation of information has no place in our national standards. There are after all a certain slate of seminal events that serve as starting points for comparisons and breakdowns of events today. Recent developments in Egypt for instance have drawn wide comparisons to popular demonstrations of Iran’s overthrow of the Shah. Those who have previous knowledge of this event are certainly in a more advantageous position to arrive at their own conclusion on the matter more quickly (this is regarding the question of the likelihood of an Islamic theocracy arising in Egypt).  Being quick however is not the same as being right and with background on this event easily available from several trusted sources, the real skills become choosing the sources, assessing the information, deciding on a valid and well reasoned position and taking action.

     This last step may be the most crucial for the future of our nation, and it is particularly important to those who teach social studies. Are we as educators preparing our students to be able to act effectively on the information they process?  I’m not just talking about voting, although that is certainly a minimum. To be “productive” users of the information, the content they acquire in their classes, they have to know how act to bring about change when it is needed, and not merely to rely on others to advocate for them.