LeftoverPi shows how to do multi-digit subtraction using addition.

Michael Wesch is an Asst. Proffessor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. He created the video entitlted, "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us," presumably for his students. Ignore the title for now and just make it through. Imagine that you're a student, not a web designer or developer, and that this is your anthropology teacher talking about something you're pretty familiar with, using the web and sites like flickr and youtube. Now go...

Did you pretend to be an undergrad? What did you think? Do you recall any teachers investing this kind of effort to instruct? I know I haven't.

The video is well executed and is cleverly self referential, as is the title itself. This is such an effective method for education because he's using the medium, the object of his lesson, to demonstrate the point of the message. On a number of levels he's referencing the participatory nature of web services to teach about the phenomenon of the participatory/mashed-up web (web 2.0). Educators should strive to think about teaching this way. It's active and engaging and is the kind of stuff that just might inspire students to do more with what they get out of school. Very cool.

Bloomberg reports that a fourth grader in Washington State was suspended after refusing to answer a question on a standardized test. Read the article to find out more about the child's respectful reason for refusing to answer the question.

After refusing to answer, the child was humiliated by the school principal, who said to him, "Good job, bud, you've ruined it for everyone in the school, the teachers and the school," and later described his behavior to his parents as "blatant defiance and insubordination." The principal was claiming that the child was bringing down the school's average test score, which was apparently unfounded because state regulations show that the test is pass/fail and there is no averaging of writing scores. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) uses test scores to measure a school's annual progress, and if schools fail to show progress, the principal can be fired.

This is what NCLB is doing to children in American schools. It's asinine to think that you can improve learning on a massive level by testing performance. What this act has done is rally principals around kids to make them test well, not to help them learn. And America's children get stuck with self-serving educators who need to care more about what they can do to save their jobs than to teach or allow kids to learn for the gratification that comes with becoming more knowledgeable and skillfull in the world.

Politicians need to stay the hell out of the education system. As with any kind of learning, you can't rush or force it for the sake of the outcome. Performing for rewards can be the root of many other problems, especially in this country. We so often perform for rewards of different kinds. Wage earners might perform for bonus money and raises. Kids might perform for stars or for grades. I fear that eventually, what might get lost in the picture is the personal rewards that come with accomplishment. To me, there's no greater reward than feeling good about what I'm doing or accomplishing -- feeling skilled and competent. Learning how to think for one's self, and understanding how to solve problems is all about the process, and not so much about the results.

I think NCLB has got it all wrong. I'm sure the outcome will be, unfortunately that we produce an ample supply of students that know how to answer test questions adequately, and much fewer that understand what to do with the all that information handed to them in years of learning how take tests.

Storyboarding and games

My son, has been asking us to tell stories about various characters he likes from TV or from video games. In recent months he's also been making up his own stories, so I've been helping him to record them in story board form. This story board is the latest evolution of a story he's telling about a character from a game on my T-Mobile Sidekick phone called Bob. Bob is a ball that bounces around from world to world trying to avoid sharp things that can pop him. His goal is to find his little girl friend.

It's a lot of fun for me to do this because it helps him visualize the stories he creates with his imagination. In the beginning he was asking us to tell him stories, but it's really nice to hear his stories, especially for the games. They're often very different, but simple worlds that would be fun to play if they were ever realized. He still does ask us to tell him stories, but somehow I find his to be much more exciting.

Story telling, game playing and literacy

We did a variation of this kind of story recording a few months ago where he would make up sentences and I would type them on my Mac. Then we would have the Mac speak the sentences for us. We mostly got to laugh at the way the computer spoke, but he also got to type letters. He's actually been able to type his name for a few months now. It's funny that the first time I saw him write a word was to type it rather than to write it. He does write letters on his Magnadoodle, but since games are his thing, it's not surprising that he learned to memorize words while playing a game.

Banner ads are good for something

Another interesting technology-related story has to do with how L is starting to recognize letter forms. Last summer he was picking out the word "pizza", I think because of the occurrence of the double z in the middle of the word. We had been playing a game by Living Books called "Arthur's Reading Race" and pizza comes up there often. But he had read it in another context, so I could only guess that he remembered it from that game.

Another funny example happened last week when we were in my home office. I had this screen up on my Mac because I was browsing Moviefone for movie listings in the neighborhood.

When he was playing he was looking at the screen and said, "That says, 'No'". I looked up to see the big word No in the banner ad on the right. I guess banner ads are good for something. I think that one is easy to recognize because on games you are presented with a dialog window asking you to answer yes or no.

The article e

Last funny tech-related reading bit is that inexplicably, L started substituting the letter E for the words A and The. So he'll say something like "here's e toy for you". Hearing "e" after all of the words, I feel like he would have been a good person to go to during those .com days, because he's come up with some interesting e words. Though, it seems nowadays, the only "e" brand that sticks in my mind is eBay. Anyway, that's enough for now.

Incredible news in the NY Times about Google becoming the world's largest digital library. Google is underwriting the digitization and provision of selected collections from research institutions including Oxford University, Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library. The goal of the Google Print project is to "create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections." It is predicted that it would take a least a decade to digitize the more than 15 million books and documents and would cost about $10 to process each item. Full text should be available for items out of copyright and excerpts will be available for copyrighted works.

When you consider this news along with other forms of electronic access to book contents, e.g. Amazon's "Look Inside the Book" feature, and commercial ebook services such as netLibrary, the impact on information seeking is rather enormous. The utility of the Internet grows immensely as we begin to gain full text access to the mass of printed knowledge that has been available only in libraries up until recently.

Using information from a distance for learning has always been what attracts me equally to both the Internet and libraries. In grad school I was fascinated by the possibilities the Internet presented for art education. These days I'm just as amazed as a father at the number of resources we have at our disposal for helping my son find information about whatever he's interested in at the moment. Presently it's trains and games.

Looking back at how I learned as a child and observing how people learn today, I can see the incredible advantage to living in this networked world. But I also wonder about how much of people's learning is affected by what they find on the Internet versus in printed publications. Along with that wondering is a deep concern I have about information literacy and the ability of people to discern authority and authenticity in what they read.

Adding massive collections of text that are thought to be authoritative just by virtue of being printed and collected in reputable libraries and via established commercial publishing houses helps to mitigate my concerns about authority a great deal. Well, at least it may improve the odds that people will find authoritative information by adding these documents to the mix. But I still wonder how people learn to make decisions about what they find on the Internet. I wonder how Google will position this new corpus. Will they relegate it to a separate space, a la Google Scholar? Will it eventually find its way into their tabs so that people can shift from viewing the glut of results from the web to the results from the digitized printed matter? Who will be the guides to help people learn how to make sense of all the information they're going to be presented? Who are going to be the reference librarians of Google -- those skilled in research and reference materials that will help me find useful information in areas I'm not knowledgable about. Will schools teach children how to think about what they are finding, to discriminate what is useful and what is not?

I'm used to the idea of the elevator pitch as something one has prepared for those scenarios when you have to explain (sell or pitch) something to someone in a short amount of time -- the time it takes to ride with that person in an elevator. It has to be short and compelling enough to capture interest and get the person to ask questions or investigate for themselves further.

By no means am I out to evangelize something that I think is a very personal choice. But if someone asks me what unschooling is, I have to be prepared to answer. There are some elevator pitches on the unschooling.com site. You can probably come up with different ones for yourself depending on the scenario and audience. One pitch I might give:

What's unschooling? It's a method for child-directed learning that we're taking with our son. It takes him out of a formal school setting and focusses on tailoring his education to his specific needs and interests. Perhaps one of the most valuable aspects of this kind of learning is that it lets him go wherever his interests take him without confining him to any conventional ideas about how, where or with whom he is allowed to learn. The world is his classroom.

I think this kind of pitch is a positive approach that talks about a few of the benefits of unschooling rather than talking about the negative effects of school. I'm tailoring my pitch to help my son's approach to talking about school, because he meets and plays with kids who are in school. Once in the library, a woman asked him if goes to school and he responded, "Some kids like school, some don't". He was a little over 3 years old at the time. We then told the woman that he's being homeschooled right now. I love our son's response because it didn't make the little girl he was sitting with (or the mother) feel like she was being judged. It was very honest.

In the end, many of us tire of having to explain our decisions to unenlightened people who want to rif on the same issues: what about socialization, etc. I've written my opinions on that issue. We've had this same experience when it comes to attachment parenting issues. If you want to be the evangelist, I guess you really have to try to be prepared to answer those questions. Being someone who is thinking about his child's education, I really feel like I've read about and talked about a lot of these issues already and may have thought about my child's education more than most schooled children's parents have. In fact, I had a great experience once when my past therapist questioned our investigation of home schooling (he was 2 at the time). I felt confident that every response I gave made home schooling sound right for our son's expressed needs at 2 and with every day, I feel like our willingness to be flexible to his needs leads not to school. But if ever his needs change, we'll work with him to find the solution that best meets his needs, whether that's in a school or outside of one.

Out in the wild, I'm not sure if I want to engage with everyone about what unschooling is. But mostly, my pitch will be about homeschooling in general, because I tend to shy away from labels and unschooling is a label that is really on the fringe. As with the AP questions, sometimes I'm just too tired to deal. But once in a while, there will be a situation where I feel like I can deliver my pitch. Receptivity and openness of the receiver always help.

An interesting thing happened the other day that affirmed my belief that learning happens best when driven by self-interest, when it's self-initiated, and when it's allowed to happen wherever and whenever the interest strikes. I was out with my wife R, son L, and two of his friends J (5 years old) and K (3 1/2 y.o.), and their mom. We were at an Upper West Side pizzeria, winding down after a nice afternoon in one of the playgrounds in Central Park. What follows is a brief description of a learning experience out "in the wild".

While we were eating, J, asked if you could get drunk from root beer. I said, "No, but you could get very gassy and burp a lot." That seemed to be a funny idea, and K gave us a nice demonstration of burping on demand, with J giving the commands to burp. Boys are funny. Once the excitement of the belching show died down, J asked what happens when you get drunk. I told him that alcohol makes it hard for your body to react to things quickly and you can get pretty giddy. I had to then define giddy, of course. He said it makes you dizzy. My wife R added that some people might say or do things they normally wouldn't do.

After a moment, J asked again, "but what happens when you get drunk." I paused for a moment and then asked him, "do you want to know what happens to your body when you drink so much alcohol that you get drunk?" He said yes. He seemed really curious, so I said that I thought that the alcohol produced chemical changes in your body, which effected your ability to do some things. I said I wasn't sure what happened specifically, so I took out my SideKick and suggested that we find out. I Googled for these terms physical physiological chemical effect alcohol. Luckily this set of results had some relevant looking pages. We found a page titled Alcohol, Chemistry and You: Effects of Ethyl Alcohol on Organ Function on ChemCases.com, a site described as a web-based resource of curriculum supplements for teaching general chemistry. I started to skim the page to get an idea of what happens when alcohol enters the bloodstream. Luckily the page included lots of illustrations I could use to point out what we were learning. The boys don't read yet.

I was able to understand enough after a skim to provide some high-level explanation of what happens when alcohol enters the body. I told them that it was describing what happened when you drink alcohol. I said it enters the blood stream in the body and that the chemicals in the alcohol act as a depressant, which means that it slows down your ability to do certain things. Then I pointed out the pictures.

I said, "this picture shows you the brain and the different parts of the brain. The different parts sort of talk to each other. This part of the brain tells you what the eye sees. This part of the brain tells your body how to move. If you see something and pick it up, those two parts of the brain are talking to each other in a way. The way they do that is by sending messages back and forth through neurons, which are sort of like electrical wires connecting the different parts of the brain to each other and to the rest of the body. I pointed out the next couple of picture.

This picture is showing you how your brain might talk to your hand to say, I want to move this finger. The message passes through those neurons from the brain to your finger.

I then skimmed a bit more and told them that special fluids in your body are used to help the messages get around in the brain. These fluids are changed somehow when alcohol is in your body. It sometimes becomes harder for parts of the brain to get those messages because other chemicals in the alcohol slow things down. I asked J if he "got it". He looked a bit confused and said "no". Then he had a glimmer in his eye and said, "it's like when a car that moves fast, has to move slower and slower," while moving his hands in the air, imitating a car. "Yes!" I said. It's like that car, which may have had all green lights, suddenly has all yellow lights. It has to slow down when it comes to each intersection, and it takes longer to get where it needs to go.

Of course, this is a major simplification, but the point was to help him satisfy his initial curiousity at some level with a high-level understanding of the effect of alcohol on the body. I told him that a lot more things happened in the body, and that we couldn't find out about them all in the pizzeria -- while skimming my Sidekick, eating a slice and having my son hang off my arm wanting to play games -- but that he could find out more if he went with his mommy to find books about it at the library. I was trying with the limited resources I had at the time to explain very simply the idea of alcohol as a depressant and think I was on the right track. But the amazing thing that happened was that J used the analogy of the car to further both of our understandings of "what happens" and actively engaged in a really interesting and meaningful dialogue with me.

How exciting it is to engage in an educational dialogue like this, both of us learning for the first time about the effect of alcohol on the body. Of course, we only focussed on one aspect of alcohol -- we didn't talk about the disinhibitory function much -- but we got to start our surface skimming of the topic. If the question were raised by my son, L, I think we could spend more time "finding out" more if he was still interested. He's only 3 now, so it's unlikely that this topic would mean much to him, but any number of topics could go the same route, e.g. how do steam engines work would be a good one, because we play with trains a lot.

This is the beauty of a participatory, self-directed education that happens outside of a school. Some people call it home schooling, others who teach at home but don't follow the rigors of such things as a curriculum call it unschooling. I'm not crazy about labels. I don't know if I would call it unschooling. I might call it "Life Education" or something. "Life-based learning" perhaps?. The idea of being an anti-schooler seems funny to me, although I know I participate in something like this. I'm not so much voting FOR Kerry as I am AGAINST Bush. I'm an Anti-Bush-Voter. Whatever. The idea for me is that with or without school, learning happens in life as the interest strikes you. It happens when you're reading, visiting a museum, watching a movie, playing a videogame. It even happens when you're drinking root beer and eating pizza with friends. This is the kind of stuff that makes learning fun. Well, one of the things anyway. And it needn't happen in a school!

I recently read a passage on education referring to John Holt's ideas about parenting. I thought it might be a good idea to capture this quote, in which Holt says:

"If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued."

This is the golden rule of reciprocity applied to parenting. I wanted to quote the above because it continues the theme from the compassion entry I wrote last week. Once you hold to this belief, it becomes extremely difficult to justify any kind of coerciveness over behaviors that simply do not harm the child or another person.

Wayne Dunn's article on "progressive education" in the school systems discusses the origin and obsession of school educators with socialization as the primary goal of grade school education. Dunn writes, "the socialization mongers are busily sacrificing kids' minds for the sake of society." I cannot agree more with this. After spending a good deal of time reading through the arguments over home schooling in an Internet Infidels forum -- and finding great pleasure in the articulate postings of Lisa Pea (Elisabeth Higgins) -- I find myself more and more turned off with people citing socialization as the key benefit to conventional public schooling.

Dunn provides some background information on progressive education to help readers understand why and how educators have become obsessed with using this idea as the central focus of grade school education.

The shortage of factual content in public schools is no accident. It's a consequence of a doctrine of education teachers themselves learn in the universities, called "socialization."

The socialization approach, known by the innocuous title "Progressive education," has dominated the educational establishment ever since philosopher John Dewey ushered it in early last century. According to Dewey, the purpose of school is to encourage "the child's own social activities."

"The mere absorbing of facts and truths," Dewey maintained, "is so exclusively individual an affair that it...tends toward selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for...mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat."

Imagine if Galileo had spurned the "mere" truths of astronomy in order to bow to his era's social standard, Church dogma.

I'm glad to finally know where this "socialization" idea as it refers to education comes from because it gets thrown around liberaly by people who argue that home schoolers will fail to benefit from the great socialization lessons learned in school. It's difficult to avoid the "What about socialization" question when you talk to someone about homeschooling. But, being people who favor ideas that are viewed as fringe, such as home schooling and even attachment parenting, we're used to these types of questions. The people who ask them, on the other hand, have read very little about what they question and, it appears, have thought just as little about the issues as well. Martha Ransom provides an interesting response to people who ask the question, "What about socialization?"

Oh, I think the word you are looking for is socializing. Socialization is actually defined as the process by which the norms and standards of our society are passed from one generation to the next. I've never really thought that a complete strangers six-year old child would be a good source of information on the correct standards of behavior in our family and in society as a whole.

Harsh! Not what I would choose to say. In general, I think, people refer to socialization as the process of learning to engage in social activities. Socializing is quite precise, but people refer to socialization as if it were meant to convey some different meaning. In the final analysis, I take the meaning of socialization to be teaching children for 12 or so years to conform rather than to be individuals.

Groups of people who riff on the socialization and education aspect of Dewey summon the "S word" in arguments about home schooling, calling it the key benefit of school and one of the main reasons why home schooling is a bad idea. Socialization is the most important aspect of education? Wow. I agree with those people who thought that learning would be the most important aspect of education. To prounounce the importance of only one aspect of childhood development, very often misses the fact that the imparting of knowledge to students is as important if not more important than learning to be socially adept. Why is it so difficult to try to take a holistic view of education and not deem one approach to learning as right and another wrong?

In the Internet Infidels thread, a few people have actually claimed to prefer to be socially adept and stupid than to be smart and socially inept. Wow! I find that sad. I personally don't see why one can't become both, especially as someone who lives in a busy and culturally diverse city that offers social opportunities every time we walk out our apartment door. But besides the fact that I refuse to generalize here about what works best for whom, I know that what some kids learn from school socializing is how to be treated like a social outcast, how to deal with cliques (avoiding them or trying to join them), and how to supress individuality to become more accepted. Some kids learn how to overpower others and use power to be cruel. Some kids experience this. Other kids escape unscathed and are able to survive the social life of school.

The thing that I find particularly irksome is that when people talk to you about school and you mention your interest in home schooling, without knowing your child and his needs, they are very often quick to try and pursuade you away from it because of this socialization issue. It's truly amazing, the amount of unsolicited advice you begin to get when you become a parent. Such generalizations with an ignorance to individual needs don't interest me, but a well-rounded education on my part of what our options are does. With every piece of literature or email discussion that I read that informs my growing capability to parent, I become more and more equipped to debate in public the ideas we are forming and the decisions we are trying to make to support our child without conforming to conventional practice.

(Thanks, Daryl Cobranchi for the link.)