When I was small, my father would read to me almost every night.  For a while, Hop on Pop by Dr. Suess was my absolute favorite book.  I made my father read it it to me so often that I had it memorized.  Once I crept up on my unsuspecting father and jumped on his belly.  To my delight, he used the same booming voice as he did during story time, “Stop! You must not hop on pop!”  I don’t think I dared to try it twice.  Shortly before my fourth birthday, I made a miraculous discovery.  Somehow, it seemed rather sudden to me at the time, I knew which word in the book was “hop”.  I knew which was “brown”.  I knew them all, not just in my head, but on the page too.  I went running into the next room to show my mom, who had patiently taught me the alphabet and the sounds of letters.  I announced that I could read, for real this time, and proved it by picking out words from random in the book (a feat I had been unable to perform when I had simply memorized the words).  In the days that followed, I would noisily call out the words that I recognized from roadsigns, cereal boxes, or any other material that came before my eyes.  Hop on Pop was my Rosetta Stone.

I’ve enjoyed reading for almost three decades now, so it was a surprise to wake up and discover that I was illiterate.  I’ve been traveling in Japan and China most of the past two weeks.  Everywhere I went, I was surrounded by unfamiliar markings that I was powerless to decipher.  It was a new experience for me.  I couldn’t even figure out bus schedules or subway maps.  Illiteracy is a frustrating experience.

My husband worked in China as an English teacher for six months and has some rudimentary knowledge of Chinese.  One day on a bus, he began to explain to me the meanings of some of the characters he recognized.  One of the words he showed me was a word for university, comprised of two characters, one meaning “big” and the other meaning “study” or “learn”: 大學.  It wasn’t quite a Hop on Pop experience for me, but I no longer felt powerless to decipher the markings around me.  I began to see “big” everywhere.  I begged for more.  I learned the characters for “water” and “car” and I was quite proud of myself when I figured out the character for person from studying the weight restriction in an elevator.  I can’t read Chinese and I can only pronounce two or three words right now, but I haven’t been so excited about learning something since that day long ago when figured out which word was “hop” and which was “pop”.

I usually write about learning and in a way, this post is no different. As a child, I learned a lot about “being a Smith” from my grandfather. He sat me on his lap and said stuff like, “Smiths are hardworking”, or “Smiths are stubborn,” or “Smiths are honest.” Simple things that were easy to remember. Even though I’m a McCollum now, I still hear Grandpa saying, “OK Smitty, how are you going to solve this one?”

Today is Grandpa’s birthday. I called him, but since he didn’t answer, I couldn’t tell him how great I think he is. So, I’m going to tell you. You see, my Grandfather Smith is a hero. My grandfather went off to fight World War II when he was still 17 years old. He later served in Korea and he earned two Bronze and one Silver Star. Years ago, my uncle accompanied my grandfather to the dedication of a local Korean War Memorial. The speaker that day asked everyone in the audience who had earned a Purple Heart to stand. A large number of the men in the audience stood. The speaker then asked everyone in the audience who had earned two Purple Hearts to remain standing. Most of the men sat down. Finally, the speaker asked everyone in the audience who had earned three Purple Hearts to remain standing. Everyone sat down, except Grandfather Smith. For a moment the audience sat in silence, then the silence was broken when one of Grandpa’s friends called out, “Smitty never learned how to duck!”

As heroic as my grandfather is, he has always pointed to his younger brother, Gene, as the true hero of the family. Great-uncle Gene was shot down while serving as a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War. Shortly after Uncle Gene was shot down, Grandpa retired from the Army and went to work on Robert Kennedy’s campaign. Almost every time Grandpa came to visit my family, we would stop by the Vietnam Memorial and wait while Grandpa tried to take a photo of his brother’s name. The photo never came out.

Recently, I had the chance to go back east to visit my family. While there, Robb and I stopped at the Wall and I tried to take a picture of Great-uncle Gene’s name.

I wish Grandpa a very happy birthday today, but I also want to express my gratitude for people like Uncle Gene, who gave up birthdays doing what they thought would make a better world for the rest of us.

About a week or so ago, I came across this Professional Development Meme on Clif Mims’s blog.  The directions for this meme are below.
Directions

Summer can be a great time for professional development. It is an opportunity to learn more about a topic, read a particular work or the works of a particular author, beef up an existing unit of instruction, advance one’s technical skills, work on that advanced degree or certification, pick up a new hobby, and finish many of the other items on our ever-growing To Do Lists. Let’s make Summer 2008 a time when we actually get to accomplish a few of those things and enjoy the thrill of marking them off our lists.

The Rules

1. Pick 3 professional development goals and commit to achieving them this summer.
2. For the purposes of this activity the end of summer will be Labor Day (09/01/08).
3. Post the above directions along with your 3 goals on your blog.
4. Tag 8 others to participate in the meme.
5. Use the following tag/ keyword/ category on your post: pdmeme.
6. Achieve your goals and “develop professionally.”
7. Commit to sharing your results on your blog during early or mid-September.

My Goals

1. Read Influencer and participate in the CASTLE online book club.
2. Prepare a statement of my personal philosophy of teaching.
3. Design an online version of the IP&T 286 course that I teach.

I’m Tagging

1. Robb
2. Steve
3. Andrea
4. Jon
5. Sarah
6. Ines
7. Sue
8. Darren

On Monday and Tuesday, Roger Schank visited BYU and gave several presentations. I was able to attend three of them. I have attempted to make sense of my notes for each presentation. Dr. Schank would be the first to point out that the lecture I heard is different from the one he gave (and different from what anyone else in the audience heard), so I welcome any clarifications of Schank’s ideas by those who know better. I also welcome questions that would force me to clarify what I have written.

Presentation #1

Roger Schank began by saying that school is profoundly broken and then he told us why. He blamed it on the “6 P’s”, but he went on a tangent after the 4th “P”. Though he did add another P later in the presentation, we never got to six. Here are the 5 “P’s”

• Parents (who think school should be the same as what they experienced)
• Press (who wants to report on students’ falling test scores)
• Publishers (who want to make money on textbooks)
• Princeton (the academic institution and the test maker)
• Politicians (who mandate that children learn things that they can’t remember themselves)

After introducing the problem, Schank began to talk about solutions. He showed us a video clip of his 7 month old grandson learning to crawl. He said that it encapsulated everything we needed to know about learning. In the video, young Max was placed on a carpet (the traction on the carpet created an environment where crawling was possible) and a small toy frog was squeaked and then placed in front of him. After looking first for help and getting none, Max was clumsily moving towards the target. Eventually, he succeeded. According to Roger Schank, learning starts with a goal, with wanting something. The role of the teacher is to set up the conditions for achieving the goal. In other words, to put the frog in the right place.

School is broken because there is rarely anything that students want from the curriculum. Getting an A or passing a course, isn’t enough of a goal for true learning to take place. Schank related his personal experience as a young instructor of Semantics at Stanford. He would begin class by asking students “Why are you here?”. Students admitted to being there for an easy A, because the course fit in their schedule, or because it was a required course, but not because they wanted to learn semantics.

Additionally, Schank argued that learning by listening is flawed because human memory works by pairing new information with similar information already stored in the brain. As you listen to a lecture, your are thinking about how that information is similar to what you already know. Since each person’s knowledge is different from everyone else in the room, every gets a different lecture.

When Schank retired from being a professor, he began to develop curriculum and training for corporations and universities. He created an online degree program for Carnegie Mellon West Coast University and has recently developed a curriculum for high school called VISTA. Both programs are intended to be entirely learning by doing. The three skills that the high school program intends to teach are:

• human relations
• communication
• logical/scientific reasoning

Presentation #2

In this presentation, Schank focused on what is currently wrong with k-16 education. He attributed our current high school curriculum to Charles Eliot, the Harvard President who proposed standardizing the University curriculum in 1892. According to Schank, the main subjects we study in high school English, History, Math, etc. match up to departments at Harvard in 1892. Schank also suggested that our current curriculum is in direct opposition to what we have known about learning since Plato, that learning is by doing.

Schank claimed that there are four types of university courses.

• student-centric (students demand it be taught)
• weed-out (designed to get people to change majors or drop out so that upper division classes will be smaller)
• discipline-centric (what is actually relevant to what you need to do to be in the field)
• faculty-centric (relevant to faculty research interests)

Schank proposed a story-centered curriculum. In order to determine the story you must identify

• goals (career and otherwise of the students)
• main activities
• sub tasks
• characteristics of the environment
• everyday skills
• commonplace obstacles

and use this information to create goal based scenarios. Educators need to ask “what stories does a community need its students to live?” The curriculum should be created by expert practitioners. The result should be a year of complete immersion, filled with a series of projects. Professors/instructors should mentor, not teach.

Presentation #3

Roger Schank introduced the idea of learning as being the result of a “goal-plan calculus”. He also talked about scripts as a standard way of organizing information and defined intelligence as the retaking and rewriting of scripts. Schank provided the following ideas about learning:

1. learning begins with a goal
2. learning requires a plan
3. without wondering why, no learning can take place
4. a theory of how things work is on the critical path to learning
5. learning depends upon reminding; in every circumstance, one needs to be reminded of something similar
6. learning entails memory modification
7. learning depends upon failure
8. learning demands story creation; storytelling solidifies/constructs the memory
9. learning comes from sincerely derived questions
10. learning is an adventure

Schank also suggested that students goals in school are not learning goals, student can not actually hear lecture, that the true role of the teacher is to provide help when one is ready for help, and that curriculum is irrelevant.

He compared the problem with learning in schools to eating processed foods. Humans are not evolutionarily prepared for either. According to Schank, modern man, like primitive man, is set up to hear, tell and remember stories. Education needs to help people develop nonconscious knowledge: procedures and scripts. In his opinion, we shouldn’t teach anything were success isn’t its own reward.

This is the last day of the comment challenge (for me anyways, the real last day was yesterday).  I’m glad that I participated in the challenge because I gained confidence.  I’m no longer feel too scared or too shy to leave a comment on a post I find interested.  Also, I found some blogs and resources that I doubt I would have found any other way.  I would definitely participate in a challenge like this again, though I think I’d lose interest if I had to complete the exact same challenges again.  I’d like to thank everyone who visited, and especially those who left a comment during this challenge.  I’d also like to thank the organizers of and other participants in the 31 day comment challenge.  Thanks for making this learning opportunity possible.  Finally, the top five things I learned from the comment challenge:

• There are many tools available for people interested in alternative forms of commenting.
• I currently have a weak personal brand.
• I shouldn’t restrict myself to English-only information.
• It is good to speak up.
• People are listening.

What lessons did you learn about what it means to “speak up” through comments that is applicable to working with students? What did you learn about how to deal with things like dissent, asking questions, communication, etc. through this process that might influence your teaching practices, either on or off-line?

Completing comment challenges required active participation.  Instead of scanning blogs and quickly moving onto the next one, I had to read a little more carefully, search for a conversation that would meet the requirements for a particular challenge.  As a result of this 31-day challenge, I’m thinking of creating  challenges for my students that would require them to participate in class discussion (online and off) at the same level of engagement.  I’ll have to ruminate for a while before I know exactly what I want to challenge students to do.  Any suggestions?

Comment challenge 29 is to write a commenting guide for students. I would want to involve my students in the process of creating their own commenting guide, one that they could with their future students. The collaborative tool that I would use for this is Google Docs (because most of my students won’t have had experience with Wikis until later in the semester). I would provide students with something like the following outline and then have them make contributions to it. Since most of my students are novices, I’d give them one or two resources (probably borrowed from the 31 day comment challenge) for each bullet point to get them thinking.

1. Commenting on others’ blogs
   • Why comment?
   • Finding blogs on which to comment
   • Protocol and etiquette
   • Characteristics of good and great comments
   • Building your personal brand through comments
2. Encouraging comments on your own blog
   • Blog commenting policies
   • Ways to encourage conversation

What else should I add? Which comment-related blog posts would you recommend that students read?

I currently have no blog commenting strategy. While participating in the comment challenge, I tried to complete the challenges given and attempted to comment more often on the blogs I regularly follow. That was it. I read Caroline Middlebrook’s post on blog commenting strategy and can see how having a commenting strategy could be almost a necessity for professional bloggers. I’m not a professional blogger, but having a blog commenting strategy seems like a good way to build my personal brand. The following four point strategy comes from Caroline Middlebrook.

• Create a Hit-List for Early Commenting
• I Mark all Blogs Using Top Commentator Plugins
• I Mark all Blogs Using a Do-Follow Plugin
• Place New Blogs in My Hit List for Testing

I already divide the blogs in my reader into “daily” and “weekly” folders, but not based on how early I’d be able to comment on them. I think I will reorder my lists. I haven’t noticed any top commentator or do-follow plugins, but I’ll keep my eye on them over the next week. I will also make a category for blogs that I come across that look like I might want to follow them. I’ll adjust my lists at least once a month and I’ll aim for every two weeks.  I will always comment on blogs that I find interesting, at least when I think that I can add to the conversation.

This challenge comes at an interesting time for me, since I am moving to Virginia in about five weeks and am in the beginning stages of a job search.  This challenge made me think about the quality and quantity of information about me available to potential employers via the Internet.

To examine the quality of information, I googled my name.  I’m not in the #1 spot, but I do make the first page.  The information that currently show up is scant, but at least correct.  However, there are at least two or three other Kimberly McCollums who I could be confused with.  How do I set myself apart?  Should I start using my middle name or my maiden name as well?  I’ve started commenting as Kimberly McCollum, after a stint as kamccollum.  I wonder a little if a change to Kimberly Anne McCollum confuse people, but I suspect that it is early enough in my “blogging/commenting career” to make the switch without problems.

If I had more content and stronger content, “my personal brand” would be more identifiable and perform better in a Google search.  I need to start sharing more.

My opinion on multi-media enhanced commenting is biased because I spend at least half of my computing time each day on a computer without a mic or a webcam.  I would advise against replacing text-based commenting with audio or video commenting, but I think audio or video commenting have a lot to offer blogging.

I found an article on in the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks on the value of using audio commentary in an asynchronous course.  The findings suggest that audio feedback:

• is better than text-based feedback for conveying nuance.
• might increase involvement in community interactions.
• is related to increased retention of content.

Last semester, I had a course where the professor provided us with audio feedback on our projects and I felt that the quality of the audio feedback was higher than any written feedback that I’d ever received.I’m not sure whether blogging communities are enough like the communities created in university courses for these findings to transfer, but I think the potential benefits are worth exploring.

I signed up for Snapvine and Seesmic accounts to see what they had to offer and then looked at some competing video and audio commenting services including Evoca, Vaestro, Riffly, and blipBack.  Evoca cost money, and though it does offer a 15 minute (recording time) trial, I’d rather exhaust my free options first.  Since I am moving in 41 days, I don’t have the time right now to research all of these options.  Does anyone have experience with any of these services?  What are the pros and cons of each?  Also, do problems with Spam increase with when you use video or audio commenting?  Thanks.