Teaching a Tool

I taught my girlfriend, Hilda, how to use Animoto to create a cute video documenting our daughter's first four months.

We started on the web-browser and then moved to the app version, which turned out to be easy to use. I introduced her to the templates and helped her choose photos. She spent the greatest amount of time composing the captions for the photos, which had to "tell a story" and convey important information about the milestones our daughter had reached. It also allowed her to send out a subtle "thank you" to the people who had provided us with nice outfits that featured in the photos.

Overall, Hilda said that Animoto was an enjoyable tool for organizing and expressing herself through photos and captions. She immediately speculated about using the paid version to document our daughter's first 12 months, which would exceed the limits of the free version. This is proof that the experience of using Animoto is motivating and convinces the user that it would be worth paying some money to continue using the app.

In terms of the classroom, I think Hilda's experience shows that I could teach this tool to my students and they would enjoy the process. If I provide them with a topic that is personally motivating, they may become motivated to use Animoto again-and-again as an engaging way to organize and present visual and text-based content.

Best practices and philosophical assumptions regarding the use of computers in the classroom

Ah, yes... the Venn diagram. Used for so many things. TPACK seems to be going a bit overboard, though. Not as badly as in the following example, but similarly overboard:

There is definitely a subjectivity and jadedness to the way the overlapping portions are described above. However, the analysis of a problem/challenge through the intersection of its major attributes can yield insight. Let's look at TPACK's approach.

The three categories of knowledge seem clear enough-- technological, content, and pedagogical--  but the overlapping categories are best understood as how each category influences the others. For example, we have to know about technology to teach it, but our technological knowledge will also influence our teaching and delivery of knowledge and the content of what we teach may be changed by technology as well. This means that the overlaps are just where one category mixes with the other, not a truly separate category of knowledge. 

I would much rather see these overlapping areas defined in terms of practice or how one implements the intersecting knowledge from these two categories in the classroom. For example, I might call TPK "Technologically Literate Teaching" to focus on the practice. TCK could be "Technologically Enhanced Research" to focus on the ways content and content discovery are altered by tech. PCK could be "Content Shaped Teaching" to focus on how changes in content require teachers to find different, novel ways to teach concepts. The synthesis of these practices would be located in the center.

That brings us to the middle part which, of course, is where it all comes together. That's TPACK itself! And TPACK is quite simply described as "the basis of effective teaching with technology, requiring an understanding of the representation of concepts using technologies; pedagogical techniques that use technologies in constructive ways to teach content; knowledge of what makes concepts difficult or easy to learn and how technology can help redress some of the problems that students face; knowledge of students’ prior knowledge and theories of epistemology; and knowledge of how technologies can be used to build on existing knowledge to develop new epistemologies or strengthen old ones” (Koehler & Mishra, 2009). 

Hmnnn... that mess of a sentence will take some picking apart. I mean, to start out with, if they understand "what makes concepts difficult or easy to learn" why do they explain things in such a convoluted way? I think basically they mean to say that we teachers have to make all these different categories of knowledge come together in our classroom-- they just chose the most complicated way to say it. Again, I would much rather that they focused on the how, rather than the what.

So that brings us to best practices. With my reinterpretation of the categories, we are led to an understanding of teaching that is informed and shaped by technology and content (both changing and dynamic). 

From the original framework, they seem to only be categorizing different forms of knowledge. I guess we have to be very knowledgeable about different types of knowledge and think about how one kind of knowledge affects the adjacent two kinds of knowledge. Its a bit redundant. It is also a bit abstract. I feel like TPACK is "zoomed out" from the real business of teaching and is describing things from an aerial view. I would revise it to focus on the actual practice of teaching.

I think I like the ISTE approach a bit better. They set their information up in a linear and hierarchical form, like all state standards, and simply describe every component in prose. That being said, ISTE ends up seeming like a very well-written, somewhat wordy shopping list of all the wonderful things a teacher would love to do with technology during the school year, but will probably not be able to organize and make happen without a great deal of help and support.

I think the best practice is to be very planful and deliberate in every use of technology in the classroom. All the different possible pitfalls should be considered and guarded against. We should be constantly growing in our knowledge and modeling interest and engagement in technology in a socially responsible way.

The philosophical assumptions regarding computers is that they are inevitable, make much learning more engaging and easily adapted to each student, and have the potential to ease many burdens that plague teachers. I guess the simplest way of paraphrasing that is that computers are good.

In the end, like any tool, technology is only as good as we are. We must teach our students the importance and moral responsibility of using technology responsibly.

Pandora

There is an imperfection in my back that gives me suspicions. I conjure up imagery of hospital stays in my early childhood. Maybe it all happened at the same time as my head injuries.

Maybe it traces back to my development in the womb. There is no easy way to find out.

There are plenty of ways that we are browbeaten into not asking the hard questions. Do not open the box! They laugh at your weakness, your predilection to curiosity.

Zeus taunts Pandora, "You will only bring suffering into the world with your stupid, meddling nature."

If you could only learn to listen, you could save yourself so much trouble. Just settle for impartial answers and ignorance.

The thing they don't tell you about Pandora is that she was snooping in her own psyche. There was no violation of privacy, no boundless curiosity that ran roughshod over norms and propriety. No uncontrollable, impulsive fingers tinkering with the clasp of a lock. She was revealing hidden knowledge about herself. Her own story was hidden from her and she had every right to uncover it.

The story she uncovered was suitably horrifying, but also freeing. In the end, it is that thin wisp of  hope that gets us through.

You never said, "Your mother is an essential part of you. Who she was, the woman I loved, her nature as a human being are important and make you who you are. Those qualities shape you and inform your personality and you and she are both valuable. Let me tell you stories of the things about her that delighted me. Let me be a mirror and reflect back the things I loved about her that I see in you." No, you were selfish. You wanted to spare yourself the pain of revisiting that time in your life.

You wanted to replace her and to revise your own history, rewrite your life, lift up the house and give it a new foundation, live above the flood.

You could have spared me many questions. You could have spared me a nervous breakdown and a dark, cold, perpetual fear of going mad in my late teens and early twenties. That would have been nice.

You are denying the fundamental nature of life. Life consists of acts of bravery-- honesty and self-revelation, willingness to express one's true nature and accept consequences, opening the doors to upheaval and change. Anything else is stagnation.

In the end I do not fear madness or misunderstanding. My mother is dead (too early) and no one can really answer the questions I have to ask. All I know for certain is that her life was much more difficult than mine. She has given me everything good that she had to give and lived the remainder of her life suffering all the torments that issued from that box-- the illness and misfortune that plague good and evil alike.

That slim strand of hope did not serve her well. Maybe she gave all her hope to me.

I know that it will see me through.

Fissures

There are these cracks along the right side of my skull-- raised, grooved canyons running from above my right ear to above the right side of my forehead. I have some mild imperfections on other parts of my head and a light scar under one of my eyebrows as well, but these ones are big (in comparison).

I remember some vague explanation from my father about a "tricycle" and a "car," but the explanation for these features is lost in time. However, as my hairline recedes and my age increases these small flaws have become more and more evident.

I wonder how many stories we carry around, written into our skin and bones-- maybe etched chemically into our nerves or other tissue-- that really belong to someone else? The events happened to us, but they are not ours. We are just the book on which they are written.

Someone else has the guilt, the knowledge, the text of the story, but they keep it on a private shelf-- hidden. Part of us knows that the story is there, but the gap left by its absence can never be filled.

We are told it doesn't matter.

I am sure they are correct.

All the accidents of fate that lead to our existence-- the family bible thrown on the fire, the friend with an ex-girlfriend in Kansas, the intoxicating smile of the intense girl in the youth group (eyes burning behind her glasses, the curls of her hair framing her face), the cramped existence in an apartment in a sleepy, coastal town-- these really don't matter. Or they matter most to someone else.

Someone else who wishes to forget them.

The plan, after all, was freedom. Freedom from the expectations of one's parents. Freedom from the constraints of dress. Freedom from the shallowness of the empty, social club religiosity of our youth. Freedom from urban life and its insults to the senses and sensibilities. Freedom to be ourselves and to travel that journey of self-discovery. Freedom to be intoxicated by our own ability to be influenced by and influence others. Freedom to associate in groups and take on their ways or have them take on yours. Freedom to make mistakes along the way.

There was a clear intention: to be happy, to be fulfilled, to experience the warmth of human companionship along the way.

So many things muddled this clarity. So many compromises were made.

Some people speak of making a deal with the devil, but entering into a contract with an angel can be just as constraining. Both require that in some way you make your life about duty and obligation and you part ways with your soul. Your soul is still there, of course (loyal companion)-- it just lives the life of a dog kept out in the cold.

The fact of life is that it forces itself upon us, unbidden. It does not need our permission. It emerges from the cracks in the universe and makes itself real. We are not required to understand.

There is never a point at which our story is our own. It always belongs to someone else. To something else. It is a voice to a universal phonograph-- a needle and a spinning wheel to play someone else's notes.

And as much as we play, we were played. But we resist the forces that shape us and so the music is discordant. We aspire to be more and in doing so we are less. The aspiration never reaches fruition because it is not in its nature to do so. Its nature is to self-perpetuate. It is a solvent, like water. It forms only to transform.

The story of aspiration is not our own. It is the same yearning as that of our ancestors and we are the new aperture through which that light can escape and project itself on the world.

That is what we feel when we are drawn in by necessity to love and attachment and the incessant withdrawals on our time and emotions-- that larger yearning. The aspiration is never concluded. Part of its modus operandi is to give birth to itself again, each time with the illusion of newness. The central lie is "individuality," and yet our individuality is never entirely our own.

In a sense it is infuriating to see some part of ourselves (but not the part that is our own) born in front of us, under our care but out of our control, living free and undermining our own chances to achieve that end goal. It is infuriating to feel some empathy for our parents and how one's own existence must have drained their own sense of control and attainment. Their standards were appropriately high and yet they have no control over the true outcome. The legacy? The surrounding society? The aspirations of their own children? All are dashed on the prow of fate like waves in choppy water. The aspiration of our ancestors took one form and seemed so solid and yet it melted away like a spider's web, like the body of a spider consumed by her young.

The mother's body never satisfies. We always need more.

When accidents intrude to erode our sense of self-control-- horrible accidents-- we are startled to hear their message of impotence. They slice through our sense of self-absorption like shark teeth through the soft hide of a seal and leave us with a gash in our self-importance. Such things are best patched up and forgotten. The lesson they give is so painful and self-contradictory. They spawn visions of possibilities, some of which threaten our view of ourselves as a good person, some of which speak to our pain and regret, some of which wish the noise of the world could just die down and leave us alone. We are challenged in our capacity to absorb, accept and adapt. We are challenged to accept our good fortune as just that-- the best possible outcome-- and not to wish things had turned out differently.

After all, a life change is sometimes easier to deal with if it takes a different form. It depends on how it chooses to arrive as much as what it is. The end of a relationship is so different when based on infidelity as opposed to an irrevocable loss or an unavoidable illness. This is because we live in story-- the story we tell ourselves.

In addition, sometimes accidents begin to seem like they had an underlying intention. Maybe we brought them about unconsciously. Maybe we wanted free, but couldn't admit it to ourselves. Now we have that guilt to carry for the rest of our lives. But as long as no one else knows.... There is the official story and there is the story we tell ourselves. Now our soul is two dogs and they fight each other and both live out in the cold.

And sometimes we pay for our love of life. It is intoxicating to be alive and young and exposed to so many possibilities. We cock the gun and spin the wheel and play the numbers and we are lucky-- so lucky. So what's the problem? She spins the wheel and, "Bam!" The shot reverberates through the rest of our life. There was some fundamental miscalculation about the nature of existence and what factors determine outcomes and their differing weight with differing subjects and so forth... we couldn't have known. That makes it better, right?

Let's try to rewrite this story. Let's start over. Let's go be pioneers in our own existence. Except there is no frontier. The frontier is gone. We have already been there. It was never there to begin with.

The angel's wings will fold over us and hide us from these truths, but even angels grow tired and eventually let down their wings. The mortal sky shines down on us once again.

Okay then-- let's just ignore the cracks. We will not acknowledge the fissures. We will not face the things that have happened, that we may have done or neglected to do. It is our own story after all-- we can claim it and keep it under lock and key.

And all the time our story wanders about the earth, infuriating us with its lack of communication, its defiance of norms and refusal to stay in one place. All the time it never was our own. It belonged to something bigger and it found a way out.

Maybe the fissures in my head tell me that we are all accidents in some sense-- I am fortunate to carry these marks in my skull and be alive. The story they tell is mild compared with many. I have no real deficits to complain about. My story will not finish with me. It will not culminate in anything that I achieve. It is not my own. It is like water and it desires more than anything to create new cracks in this reality, apertures through which it can flow, wheels it can turn and songs it can sing until the song of all humanity is over.

Clarity

Just to be clear:

We are in this moment. Whatever we are doing, whatever we are thinking or being, we are in this moment, where we are alive-- amazingly so. Alive.

We are molecules. All around us are molecules. We are trading molecules constantly. Everything is in motion. This moment we are made of teeming molecular activity of which we are not really aware.

We are cells. All around us are cells. Living things made of cells. Our cells are constantly rebuilding, renewing. We are not the same matter. We are new, moment by moment. Yet we remain the same. We have pounds of little mindless microorganisms in our guts who are also a part of us. We share our being with them. We need them. They are the reason we can eat. They are 70% of our immune system. There are millions of them. They depend on us, we on them. Yet we are not really aware of them. The entire digestive tract from mouth to exit is really *outside* of our body, even though it is contained within our body. These small creatures live next to us, but are contained within us. The nutrients that enter our body are absorbed into our body from this tube that runs through us. The only things that actually enter into our body are broken down into their components. We take those parts, those fragments of cells, those molecules and make them into ourselves. The many single-celled creatures that pass through this existence with us help us accomplish this task. When we were infants, we did not do this. We took nutrients directly into us through the blood in the umbilical cord. Our mother's blood. We were a part of her. We were within her, constructing ourselves. She was constructing us. In some ways we were made of pieces of her-- genetically similar pieces-- and pieces of our father that were made to live within her. In other ways we are made of pieces of our ancestors. Genetic material similar to them, pieces of them, traits and features of them. The mitochondria, in particular (power plants of the cells) were passed down from our maternal line. All the women down that line shared those mitochondria. Mitochondria are also something that lives within us. They are their own thing, with their own RNA, but they live within our cells. Without them, our cells would lack the energy to live. They are similar to chloroplasts in plants. From ancient times, mitochondria established an alliance with cells, to perpetuate themselves by being a part of a larger cell. The cells have DNA of their own. The DNA tells the cells how to make an individual creature, and in each cell of that creature is a mitochondria. Something else that lives in that cell and provides energy so that the rest of the cell's work can occur. So we can exist.

We exist in this moment, but we do not know all that we are-- all the separate impulses toward existence that come together to make us what we are. Alive. In this moment. A continuance of things begun far before us. A blip in the massive arc of time and the manifestation of life in the form of self-replicating cells. Self-replicating elements of cells. So many discrete things come together to make us possible. We are not even dimly aware. We are in this moment. Alive. Amazing, really.

We are on this planet. A planet with the distance from the sun and the atmosphere necessary for our kind of life. A precise planet. A planet just exactly like we needed. A planet teeming with all sorts of life. Mind boggling, intricate, complex, fecund life. Whole classes of living things that have existed and ceased to exist. Previous versions of what we see around us today. Previous versions of us. We are possible because of an amazing synchrony of just the right things at a planetary scale. Outside of this bubble there is space. Cold and airless. Below us is a molten core, teeming with heat and energy. Both capable of squashing our existence. Both held in balance by the thin crust of earth, water and atmosphere that stands between them, in which we exist. How can this be so? Because it is. Even the most unlikely things become 100% probable once they exist. But the blobs of molten rock spinning about the young sun, the coalescence of gases around a steaming sphere suspended in the blackness of space, the collision of a fairly large celestial body and the expulsion of a blob that became our moon, tethered to our gravity, the eventual condensation of oceans and the tidal effects of the moon, the eventual emergence of single celled organisms and, down the line, down the line, plants to oxygenate the air, animals to breathe the plant waste product, oxygen, and-- in time-- animals with senses, with vision (wondrous thing), with smell, with touch, with taste and hearing-- none of this seems particularly likely to me. But it happened. It is why we are. 

And we are in this moment, which we cannot fully understand. A moment of life. Life! Amazing.

And we are our conditioning. Our experience in this world has taught us to expect certain things, to see things according to norms, to perceive as we were taught to perceive. We have learned by positive example and by negative experience. We are a complex tangle of intersecting and sometimes conflicting conditioning. Conditioning of which we are not fully aware, but that colors our perception of this remarkable world in which we take part. Our conditioning also creates this moment. Our experience and perception of this moment, which we do not fully understand.

And we are members of a society and culture. We have our own subculture within that culture. We have many very human, constructed, decided-upon, customary things that make up our lives, our moments. We are not fully aware of how these things change who we are, what we experience. They help create this moment. Whether we know we are influenced or not, we are. We are marionettes in the web of our influences. All is influence. Culture and society move on inexorably, with our without us. They emerge from us, wherever humans gather together. They are us and greater than us. They are more than the sum of their parts. And yet, where the parts die they fade away. In the end, amassed power, wealth, technology and influence decide who we will be, how we will live, who will live, what our moments will be like. We are trapped in this moment, surrounded by our things and other people with their things and groupings of people in corporations and systems and their things and political bodies and their things and militaries and their things and so on and so forth and all these things influence and determine each other. They also make this moment, in which we exist, which we do not fully understand. 

Societies rise and fall, cultures flower and fade, humans continue doing all the things humans do. We can live our lives as well as we can and still, terrible things will be happening everywhere, to other humans-- beings just as amazing as we are. We can seek to correct society's wrongs, but stand a good chance of adding to them. Because we are human. What do humans do? They add and add and add and act and act and act and say and say and say and the rest of the world is changed. How do we change the world? We take it apart and build new things out of it, we kill it, destroy it, replant it, alter it genetically, collect and concentrate things at levels not found in nature, redesign it, add to it, subtract from it. We do not leave it alone. If we did leave it alone, the humans who do not leave it alone will supplant us. If we attack those who despoil the world that sustains us, we will either add to these human problems or we will be destroyed. We can live good lives and benefit others on a small scale, but all those that we benefit will be subjected to unchangeable things on a grand scale. Society has become as inexorable as weather patterns. We can predict it, but we cannot prevent it. We can prepare, we can stock up, we can batten down the hatches, we can protect or own, but the storm will come. We may be spared, we may not, but the most we can do is to do as little as possible. We must not add to the things that destabilize this grand and awesome moment in which we exist-- so improbable! We must not be a part of anger or greed or exploitation or outsized desires. We also must not think to change human nature or save the world. These things are out of our hands. We have this moment-- inconceivable and wondrous. Life.

We have imaginations and ambition. We can imagine a better world. We can even fight like Che Guevara for these glimmering in our minds. We may even succeed. But in time, humans doing human things will supplant even the most perfect of societies and we will be back to the same problems. Humans doing human things, ad nauseum, ad infinitum, in every corner of the planet.

But for the fact that we seize the grandeur and grace of this moment, we would do the same thing. But we appreciate that we are a small, small part of something unimaginably huge. Beyond comprehension. We are amazed at our own existence, the privilege of breath and thought. We will not squander our time with blind human pursuits. We will be in this moment, with all living things. We will live in a deep appreciation for all beings, all people, creatures and things with whom we share this existence. Because it is beyond comprehension that we even get to be here. This is amazing. We are alive! We can think! We can be aware of our selves! What else can compare?

We are emotion. We can chart the peaks and valleys of our existence based on those swings between love and loss, comfort and want, wonder and disappointment, dream and disillusionment, connection and isolation. Sometimes there are vast feelings of unity that come upon us when faced with a beautiful view, a quality of light when the sun is just setting and all is transformed, a work of art, a song a feeling of communion with a group of like-minded people, an exquisite taste or a sublime smell. We are sensory and chemical creatures. We can be transported or dulled by our experiences. Our nerve endings crave stimulation or relief and the shift between these two extremes can cause the most memorable of our moments.

But under all of that, we are still in this moment. We are something else, something more basic. The self, or internalized point of view, that is experiencing this moment. The world moves around us, but something stays the same. If we can be that self, that still point around which all things turn, then we can be truly *of* this moment. We can intuit, beyond the reach of thought and sensation, what we truly are, what a moment truly is, how it can be perceived as unperceivable, how it can be sensed as beyond sensation, how it can transcend probability and space and time and existence and even being and be that unnameable thing at the core of all that is. Empty and yet unfathomably full. Here and now and yet nowhere and never. All we ever really have and nothing. Us and no-one. Unity and multitudinous possibility. The answer and no answer at all. The abscence of a need for an answer. The center. The everything.

Where does it all come from? We don't know. 

It is amazing.

Just to be clear-- we know nothing.

 

Posted via email from Run Ahead of Me

The Creative Fire

My mind has always been strewn with tinder, set alight by imagination-- brilliant with flame. But art in its true practice is hardwood-- patiently carved into something fire-resistant, self-evident, semi-permanent, complete, but able to set the minds of others on fire with a single gaze.

My mind has been on fire, with art-- so much that I can hardly create. Instead I set ablaze the shavings from my intermittent attempts at carving and lean into the flames, in hopes they will burn away my need to be once again set afire.

The Trials of this Life

Everything in this society is an invitation to overwhelming emotions and violence.

It takes a lot not give in.

Here's a nugget of Zen wisdom: "When the mind is still, everything else can move around it and it can remain unaffected."

But how easy is that?

The neighbor's kid has gone out of his way to mow down the peas in my garden when he was trimming the weeds. He also took a dump in my compost pile, possibly making it toxic.

Last Father's Day he gave me what I like to think of as a "Happy Fucking Father's Day!" gift, by breaking fluorescent light bulbs all over my back porch.

It would be easy to be affected by these things, but he's obviously acting out of his own confusion. His behavior has nothing to do with me.

What would be the other option? Arguments? Violence? Getting even? All of that is short sighted and would just make my own life worse.

My brother recently decided to leave his family (wife and three kids). Once again, it would be easy to accept this invitation to have overwhelmingly negative feelings-- anger toward him and sorrow for his family and the rest of my family. I also could feel a lot of sorrow for him and confusion about what he's doing, and what possible motives he could have for doing such a thing.

But I have put a comfortable distance between myself and my family for precisely this reason. I would do no good by wading into a situation where I can only experience more sorrow.

I have to let him live his life. Even if he's harming others.

I have to let the neighbor kid live his life, even if he's making some seriously bad choices and targeting innocent people.

Sometimes this approach feels dangerously close to "not caring." But where does caring a lot get you? It gets you burned. It's better to live peaceably and avoid other peoples' drama.

There's always more than enough drama to go around. Why create anymore?

So, in the end, there's more than a little sorrow involved in just letting folks go about their business, making a mess of their lives and hurting those around them. But I will not be like them. I will remain still.

Posted via email from Run Ahead of Me