Cole W. Camplese

Wesch Rethinking Education

Michael Wesch was the keynote at our TLT Symposium and he was truly a wonderful participant. Humble and quietly brilliant, his talk resonated with the entire audience in ways I hadn't seen previously. His new video above doesn't share the same pace as his previous work, but it demands attention none the less. What is interesting to me is that he didn't push the video's message as an agenda item last year, but it was clear it was in him. What I wonder is how long has he been thinking about creating this new narrative?

Who I Work For

In one of the talks I do on a semi-regular basis I share thoughts on my audiences -- one is way down the path and the other is the one that stands before me on my campus. While the students I work to inspire and support right now are really important, it is the ones down the path a bit that I love to think about. I have a built in barometer living in my house with my own two digital kids. My daughter is eight and my son is 3 and they are both heavily engaged in the use of digital devices.

More and more I am watching both of them attacking digital devices in ways that just a year or so ago they didn't. They've mastered the Nintendo Wii, their DSi, the iPod Touch, and in a lot of ways the Mac. My little boy can browse (and we've learned, also place things in a sopping cart) the web with relative ease. But what has become amazing is how my daughter is using the Mac to create digital artifacts -- the creation of blog posts, videos using PhotoBooth, and podcasts using GarageBand seem close to second nature to her. It gives me a great view into what our students will demand of us as they arrive on campus.

With that said I continue to be torn about my need to provide the platforms, but I still think it is important and I do not think the platforms we provide are simple commodities given the importance of privacy, identity, and other emerging concerns.

I showed Brad Kozlek my daughter's travel journal she keeps for school yesterday and we got to talking about how cool it is that we are building the future infrastructure to support children like her. She keeps her travel journal as a WordPress blog and sends the URL to her teachers, classmates, and family. I love everything about it -- especially that she can do it herself. This time we even looked at how to embed pictures from Flickr in her posts! What is interesting is that this space grows over time and allows us to look back at things in ways one can't when living in a more analog Universe. We looked back at our trip to Washington DC as we were finishing the post from the Outer Banks with real amazement of all we did -- we sort of relived the trip and that was really cool.

So when people ask me why I care so much about providing platforms for digital expression one of the first stories I tell them is the one about my own children and how I want education to be able to support them in all sorts of ways. I want them to be able to do what they can do at home inside the walls of the school ... I need them to feel like the things they make are an important part of who they are today and who they will become. I need them to feel the power related to thinking about their thinking and I really want them to actively reflect on what that means to them. As I sat looking at her travel blog I actually got goose bumps thinking about how important our work really is -- and how important it is to build opportunities for how it should be in the future.

Taking a Break

I've been quiet here for the last week trying to collect thoughts after writing so much last month. I think I'll be a little quiet for the next several days as well. I'm not giving up on writing, just need to find my voice again. Before I sign off to enjoy Spring Break, I wanted to mention something ... I dropped a friend of the family's son off at school today for them and walked him to his pre-K classroom. It is the same private school my daughter went to prior to moving on to first grade this year at the public school. As I was walking down the hall I saw the quilt her class made last year as a culminating project. I was stopped in my tracks -- I was just in awe of what it means.

It was filled with color, life, and inspiration. I recall hearing her talk about the quilt nearly every day last year and didn't quite understand why it was such a big deal. Even at her graduation when they showed it off it didn't quite hit me. Seeing this living example of my daughter's contribution to the intellectual, emotional, and perhaps spiritual embodiment of her school in the hall today made me both very sad and very happy. It is, in every single way, in stark contrast to the representation of her contribution in the public school system -- the "adequate sign." I can't tell you how it made me feel to know she made something tangible that the current students point to as a model for how they learn to contribute, share, and participate in the process of learning. Really an amazing thing to see.

And with that, I'll talk to you when the mood strikes!

Making Connections

This is a rambling mess, but I'm not apologizing. You've been warned.

I've been thinking about the Twitter panel from Friday at the IST Grad Symposium and have come to see a couple of camps ... one group looks at Twitter and says real connections don't happen, that it is a waste of time, and an ego echo chamber. There is another group that sees it as full of opportunities to make real connections because it is simply a platform. There's yet another who is like the first group, but they do participate. Seeing these three camps may be a generalization and I can deal with anyone disagreeing with me. I don't really care too much which camp people fall into and I think I've arrived at a place where I'm not going to justify the technology. I'm just done with that argument -- if you want to play, play. If you don't, don't.

What I am interested in is having opportunities to talk about the affordances and how they relate to problems of practice. I see challenges across the board in our classrooms and what I don't see enough are people working to talk about them constructively. I hear a lot of people complain and never work to come together to do anything about them ... I see way too many students sitting by themselves in classrooms not engaged, too many faculty teaching from PowerPoint, and too many administrators not pushing for reform. I'm not saying Twitter has anything to do with any of it, but don't you think it is about time we start to really come together, make some connections, and radically do something about it all?

I can talk to the World in the blink of an eye and I know there are lots of smart people out there toiling away at what they do who are waking up to how bad it all really is. The big change here is that we can hear each other and we can change things if we want by coming together. And you know what, at the end of the day it may not be about changing the system at all, it may be about a new environment where connections happen and knowledge is shared openly. Maybe learning communities can happen without the corporate bullshit that much of our educational system is built on -- I watch my first grader come home every night with nothing but worksheets from some curriculum book and I see students on campus doing nothing but reading from textbooks and taking electronic tests built from a publisher's test bank. What kind of education is that? Why the hell do we let it happen?

I'm done with it. I've decided that I will work to make change happen and I'm inviting other people ... anyone with a connection that wants to start a revolution knows where to find me.