Tag Archives: Philosophy

Life as an Open Book

On June 4th, I gave a talk called Life as an Open Book at Qatar Academy for the first ever Tedx event put together by Julie Lindsay.

I spent quite a bit of time planning the talk, but the execution was not exactly what I had in mind. I was plagued by repetition, false starts, and a general sense of incoherence. I have attempted to piece together as much of the original talk as I could.

The main idea is:

How can we encourage teachers to look beyond their fear, follow their passions and begin to create open honest online identities that reflect their true selves in order to better connect with their students for a more authentic learning environment. Eventually creating a system that not only allows for teacher creativity and expression but actively promotes and encourages it, so teachers are not too busy or scared to express themselves online, and actually given time to reflect, create, and share.

Life as an Open Book from Intrepid on Vimeo.

I would appreciate any and all comments.

Use Your Brain

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I was going to start this post with the line, “I hate to toot my own horn but…” instead I decided to start it with, “To toot my own horn…” Sometimes, the affects of our work comes back in ways we could never imagine, and it is in these waves that we can feel reassured and confident that we are on the right track!

I received the following emails from a woman I used to wrok with at my former school. The same school from which I was forced to resign:

Hey Jabiz!

I am teaching a new elective this year, called “Be the Change.” I recently asked students to respond to the Wiki prompt: Who inspires you, and why? This was the response from (insert name of student), currently in 8th grade:

I am going to have to go with my 3rd quarter 7th grade social studies/ language arts teacher, Mr. Raisdana. Mr. Raisdana was an amazing teacher. He really made us think about how we were learning. He taught us not the skills to join the workforce of today, but the skills needed to be a learner so we can learn to be the workforce of tomorrow however different they may be. He helped us create networks of learners through blogging. He was an activist, a supporter of global peace. Sadly, he was fired. I do not want to bring into this place any discussion of whether or not he was fired justly but I will say that I miss him. We lost a creative teacher who helped make learning fun. (After all, how many teachers do you know who keep a bowl of dried fruit on their desk for everyone to enjoy?) He encouraged us to use our brains to a fuller extent, for a project on ancient Rome, a parody of the song Beautiful Girl is acceptable. And he keeps working, even with a new full time teaching position, on is own learners network. I hope I can learn from him and am able to adopt some of his qualities in my self.

This is why I teach. Period. To get through to kids. To get them to think for themselves and question the world around them. I am sharing this because I am proud of the work I do and felt the need to spread the joy!

English Teacher

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As a teacher who understands and champions the benefits of using new media, social networking, or for lack of a better word- technology in the classroom, I think I often lose sight of what it is I am actually teaching. With recruiting season fast approaching, I have found myself immersed in the painstaking task of marketing myself.

While updating my resume, highlighting my innovative skills, or writing cover letters stressing my ability to be adaptive, collaborative, and visionary, I noticed how little I was talking about my love of the subject I teach- Language Arts.

It seems there is very little room in modern job recruitment for simply talking about why one chose to teach the subject of their expertise. Perhaps, I have gone about selling my career all wrong. Perhaps, administrators are not looking to see that their teachers are able to work in dynamic collaborative environments for the purpose of improving student learning. Maybe they just want to read why a certain teacher loves literature or science, or whatever the case may be. Perhaps, the only thing they would like to hear us discuss is how we can transfer our love of Steinbeck or Fitzgerald to students who are, more and more rapidly, becoming disengaged from the written word.

It is conceivable that after all the talk about our philosophies, skills, and technological know how, we as teachers should sit back and reflect upon what it is that we love about the subjects we teach everyday.

There is something indescribable about the feeling of sitting in a comfortable place, highlighter in hand, reading a great book. That feeling of kinship, understanding and bonding that is formed between author and reader is the epitome of social networking. We spend so much time and energy discovering new tools to help connect our students to information and to each other, that we sometimes forget that truly understanding a great piece of literature, having the ability to deconstruct, analyze, and synthesis text, and finally being able to produce a carefully crafted critique of a work can be just as effective of a skill to have as say blogging.

The poster children for how not to teach a class in the new age of technological pedagogy is the old chalk and talk, lecture from the podium, teacher as expert, been teaching Macbeth the same way for twenty years, thinks he or she is a professor, English teacher.

While I have spent much of my career, arguing that this style of top-down, teacher centered teaching is ineffective, lately I have been thinking that maybe simply teaching students how to read effectively is the most important thing we can do as Language Arts teachers. If our job is to teach literature then perhaps we need nothing more that the text. Everything else sometimes seems to be nothing more than a dog-and-pony show designed to keep students entertained, but not actually focused on the work.

I entered teaching because I wanted to help young people understand the world around them, in hopes that they would feel obliged to contribute to its fate. I chose to teach English because I see art in general, and literature in particular, as the greatest tool humankind has produced to help us connect and communicate with each other.

Photo by nozomiiqel

Students may need to use blogs and other web based tools to share what they find, and connect with other students, but ultimately all they need is a good book and an inspirational teacher to guide them through it. Collaboration is great, but reading is often a very solitary act. Connection with a great piece of fiction needs only three things: author, reader, text. Everything else is secondary.

Reading over my resume and various cover letters, I am afraid that perhaps my devotion to technology is perhaps overshadowing my love of Language Arts. I am first and foremost a lover of books. My goal is to arouse this level of worship onto my students. I want students, parents, and administrators to know that I am not an IT teacher. I am a Language Arts teacher who realizes that the new web is a fantastic place for learning. I have chosen to use as many tools as I can to accomplish this task, but I am in no way convinced that technology is the only way.

I am not sure anyone feels this way. It feels like teachers are being forced into these dialectical relationships, where either you are an integrated teacher, or you are a dinosaur. I refuse to buy into this. As I try to show prospective employers why I am the best fit for the English teacher position, perhaps I need to find space in my CV to highlight these factors as well.

What do you think? Is your teaching sometimes overshadowed by the tools you use? Do you find yourself more excited by a new web application then say a Nabokov novel?

Identity, Avatars, and Future of Humanity

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Frozen in fear every time we appear
Im not surprised and really, why should I be?
See nothing wrong
See nothing wrong
So sick and tired of all these pictures of me
Completely wrong
Totally wrong
Go walking by
Here come another guy…

Elliot Smith

I was sitting in a closing session at Learning 2.008 with Ewan McIntosh and a group of teachers, and the conversation became very free and loose. The session was designed to be an open gathering, a place to discuss any lingering ideas and end the conference. People were throwing out ideas, while others either let them drop or set them up for a volley. I don’t remember everything we discussed: something about being able to download your brain some time in the future, buying domain names for your children to be sure you are in control of their web presence, and Facebook profile pictures.

Ewan joked about how he couldn’t understand why people would change their Facebook profile picture every other day. The room chuckled a bit as he made the comment, but I smiled uncomfortably. I have changed my profile picture 31 times in the last year.

At the time, I didn’t have the energy to explain why I felt the need to constantly update what I look like, but recently I have been thinking a lot about the idea of profile pictures, avatars, self-expression, and the online social networking community. I think I may have a response.

These ideas began to germinate in earnest last week after two separate incidents. The first was after a talk I had with Bud Hunt regarding the difference between a network and a community, and the second was after I started to look at avatar creation sites for my students. I am the computer club teacher, and I will soon start the Web 2.0 network journey with a group of ten 4th-6th graders.

What do the pictures of ourselves that we present to the world mean? How can a simple profile picture affect a person’s place within a community of strangers?

You may be thinking that a topic likes this is at best superficial and at worst a study of narcissism and vanity, but I ask that you bear with me.

The wikipedia article on Self says:

The self is a key construct in several schools of psychology, broadly referring to the cognitive representation of one’s identity. The earliest formulation of the self in modern psychology stems from the distinction between the self as I, the subjective knower, and the self as Me, the object that is known. Current views of the self in psychology diverge greatly from this early conception, positioning the self as playing an integral part in human motivation, cognition, affect, and social identity.

The article about Self-Portrait goes on to say:

The self-portraits of many Contemporary artists and Modernists often are characterized by a strong sense of narrative, often but not strictly limited to vignettes from the artists life-story. Sometimes the narrative resembles fantasy, roleplaying and fiction.
The self-portrait can be a very effective form of advertising for an artist, especially of course for a portrait painter.

The self-portraits of many Contemporary artists and Modernists often are characterized by a strong sense of narrative, often but not strictly limited to vignettes from the artists life-story. Sometimes the narrative resembles fantasy, role playing and fiction.

Finally Jay B. McDaniel says:

When one attains enlightenment in Zen Buddhism, at least two things are realized. First, one realizes that the deepest level of one’s life — what in Zen is called the “true self” — is always here-and-now. And second, one understands that this true self, even though here-and-now, is always changing.

What does this all mean to me, and what does it have to do with my network avatars and profile pictures? This is what I took away from the quotes above: The self is a key construct of one’s identity. Self-portraits are characterized by a strong sense of narrative. Sometimes the narrative resembles fantasy, role-playing and fiction. True self, even though here-and-now, is always changing.

In other words: Our sense of identity is derived from the story we tell the world and this story is constantly changing.

In an online world, the images we present of ourselves can be the most powerful representations we offer. I see myself as more than a static promotional portrait. I am a being in a constant state of flux, and I feel it is crucial that these transformations be presented to my equally malleable network. After talking with Bud, I realized that our social networks can never really know exactly who we are, and let’s be honest even our closest friends can only guess. How can we build community, if each individual member does not really know who any other member is?

We present fragments of ourselves online, as if offering cyberspace a random set of pixels, will somehow paint a clear picture of who we are. We use blog posts, Tweets, Skype calls, profile pics, book lists, photos, podcasts, and music sharing sites to scatter pieces of ourselves into a giant void, hoping that maybe somebody out there is picking up the pieces, and what’s more we hope that once they have assembled some sort if idea of who we are, they will like the image enough to start building a community around it.

An online community is nothing more than a group of people sharing the same puzzle of online debris. I guess my philosophy is that the more open, honest, and raw I can be, the clearer picture I can paint, thus creating the most authentic community for myself. As my resignation from my job proves, this openness is not always the best route to take, but it is the only one I know. I believe in web 2.0. I believe open honest communication is one of the best tools we have to building a better world. All of this talk about technology and collaboration means more to me than mere talking points. I need this. Humanities needs this. Our hope in the future lies in teaching young people to learn to express themselves as honesty and openly as they can, so we can begin to tear down the walls that have been constructed by generations of cultural, nationalistic, and religious engineers.

I am still evading why any of this is relevant to profile pictures and avatars. The portrait is one of the most powerful ways to share ones identity. The tiny picture next to each Tweet is the first impression many newcomers to any network will see. I get excited when I see people change their photos, because I feel that they are real, changing, and growing.

I am not the same person one day from the next, so how can my picture stay the same month after month. I felt a bit uncomfortable after I changed my picture to a computer-generated avatar. It felt as if I was cheating somehow. But after a few days, I am starting to feel more comfortable with the image, because I know that it too will change. This is simply a stage of who I am at this stage of my life. I love looking back and seeing all of the people I have been:

If I am a collage educated father and teacher, and I am still dealing with these kinds of identity issues, imagine what our students are going through. In an image-saturated world, they need to be having conversations about self, identity, and community, especially if we want them to be participating in a world where they may not meet every person they interact with online. We need to teach them how to sort through the debris and construct the puzzles of the people they encounter online. More importantly we need to teach them how to express themselves as clearly as they can, so they are able to paint the most authentic picture of who they are. An avatar or profile picture should mean more to us than some throw away superficial exercise in vanity. These pictures are who we are online, so they deserve thought and attention.

Learning 2.008

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I am sitting in an unconference session called “Echo Chamber.” To my right Brian Crosby scratches his hair as Clarence Fischer, who sits to my left, proposes that an echo chamber may sometimes be a good thing, a source of rejuvenation. I can’t seem to articulate what I find disconcerting about the echo chamber. David Warlick occasionally peaks out from behind his laptop and offers some insight. I am a bit star-struck, sitting in this room with just the four of us; a few teachers from ISB stroll in and make me feel more knowledgeable. I want to say that communities need to be occasionally shaken up and infiltrated to keep them up to date. I am stuck in limbo between feeling respect and admiration for these men and then contemplating the fact that if I know that I am just as good of a teacher as any of them, then why do I feel inadequate in their presence. This back and forth plays with my emotions, rendering me unable to get my point across.

Don’t get me wrong; I immensely respect these men along with all of the presenters at Learning 2.008. An hour before I was listening to Ewan McIntosh talk about how tech tools are not transformative. Pedagogy is transformative. I have skimmed Ewan’s blog for months, but not until I saw him speak did I truly understand where he is coming from. Later, I would listen to Alan Levine discuss the Horizon project, and later still take notes on a back channel as Julie Lindsay extolled the virtue of mobile devices.

If Learning 2.008 taught me anything it is that digital networks are nothing more than real human beings trying to figure it all out. I am not sure I can define what “it” is exactly, but that is part of what we are trying to do. We can read each others blogs, talk on Skype, or follow Tweets, but these tools will only paint an abstract picture of who we really are. No matter how easy the new web makes it for people to communicate and build networks, we still need that authentic human interaction. We still need to watch body language, pay attention to tone of voice, and make people laugh to really connect with other human beings. Thank goodness for that.

It was refreshing to see that we are more than blog posts, avatars, and @names. The participants of this conference, by their presence alone proved that we are a group of diverse educators determined to find better ways to learn. No one truly knows the secret answer, because there is no secret answer. We, and I say we with pride because I learned that I too have ideas to offer, are simply trying to find ways to educate children as best we can. Technology is not the answer. It really doesn’t have much to do with technology at all. It has to do with community and the sharing of knowledge and ideas! Technology is simply a way for sharing ideas. The questions that kept resurfacing at every session I attended was- how can we convince teachers to use technology? I think we need to help teachers learn how they can become members of vibrant communities, so that they can teach their students to expand their social networks as well. This can be completely outside the scope of technology. Jennifer Jones says it best,

“Before we connect globally, we need to connect locally, whether we use technology, or just step outside. I feel this is critical to change in our systems.”

Technology is just a tool that at this time in our evolution is the most appropriate for creating wide, far-reaching, cooperative communities that foster, promote, and encourage learning. This conference taught me that communities take time to build and that they must be unique for each member. Session after session, time spent out at dinner with twitter friends, and time spent chatting over food with fellow tech enthusiasts, taught me that my network is like a garden, in that it constantly needs to be tended.

When I first started blogging I wanted nothing more than a robust interactive audience. I wanted the largest number of people to read by posts. Like my students, I wanted to watch the little red globs infect my cluster map like a cancer. I constantly examined by statistics to see how many people had read what I wrote. I wished that the “big” names would read my work, realize my genius, and catapult me into the upper echelon of the educational blogosphere. In short, I felt that the quantity of readers would directly reflect the quality of my network. To return to the garden analogy, I wanted to transplant myself into a pre-made heirloom garden of specialized thriving plants. I was reading the names I had been told to read. I was following the people I was told to follow on Twitter. I had been sold a perfect network, and I thought that all I had to do was sit back and let the learning community sweep me away.

The conference taught me that, I can read well-known bloggers, I can even sit with them in a room and discuss the echo-chamber, but to truly feel the power of the network I have to plant my own garden and tend it religiously. It is not enough to simply use twitter to get to know someone, you need to meet them, and laugh over Chinese food, take a walk in Golden Gate park, share a cab. This conference proved that I don’t need to be connected to the network, or a network, but that it is more important that I build my own functioning network of like-minded teachers and students.

“Audiences drive by while communities drop in.”

As Clarence’s quote elucidates, I learned that it is not enough to simply copy and paste the nodes of a generic network and expect it to be fruitful. We must build communities. This takes time. This takes honesty and passion. This takes effort and patience. This takes dedication and hard work.

“You write where people care! Small passionate communities matter.”

I am sure hundreds of blog posts have already been written about what Learning 2.008 meant to the various participants. What do I have to say that is any different? What do I have to say that is relevant or meaningful in anyway? These are questions I often find myself asking myself as I blog. The longer I swim around educational blogs, the more I realize that I am not as intelligent as I like to think. People articulate their thoughts more effectively than me; people write better than me, people comment more insightfully than me. In short, I often feel that the network would be fine without my little musings in this tiny corner of the Internet, which I have etched out for myself.

So why do I bother? I may not have the credentials or the talent, but after talking with teachers from around the world at this conference, I realized that I do have some things to say that others want to hear. This is the beauty of the network. Day in and day out I am threading my own narrative and trying to somehow tie it to others. I am carefully and deliberately tending my garden. Leaving Tweets about music and politics, never afraid to stand behind my ideas, using a raw and honest voice with an infectious enthusiasm, posting videos to youtube and photos to Flickr, I will keep sowing my seeds in my corner of the Web. Sometimes in a whisper, sometimes through a roar, I will wait patiently hoping that my tribe will find their way to my doorstep and together we will move forward.