Category: Creativity

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This textbook is broken!

Our school is just about to provide Netbook computers (Lenovo S10s in case you’re interested) to all of our Year 6 students.  This is part of a project to provide an immersive technology-rich year at an age where we think it will do the most good.  Lots of Web 2.0 and open Source software tools, use of Open Office and Google Docs as their main productivity environments, access to school hosted blogs and wikis, etc.  We are trying to make use of these tools to promote creativity, productivity and higher order thinking. We want to expose them to the many great digital resources out there, while teaching them the information literacy skills needed to navigate through the massive amounts of information available.  The kids and their teachers are SO excited and, to be honest, so am I.

So when I stumbled across this video this morning I really had a giggle.  The students who made this clip did a great job of pointing out the limitations of non-digital media in a very funny way.  It’s so true, and although I don’t really agree with the whole “digital natives” idea in terms of their deeper understanding of technology, I certainly agree that our kids do just expect things to work in a certain way.  And they are right… Why shouldn’t a picture be clickable?  Or a word be linkable?  Or a page be zoomable?  And what exactly is the point of text if it’s not hypertext?

Enjoy the video.  I did.

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Where does cheating begin?

Imagine this scenario… you are suddenly diagnosed with a life threatening disease, something very dangerous but quite curable if you have the right information about how to do so.  Your doctor knows that there is an answer to your serious problem, but cannot recall what drug is required to treat it.  He remembers reading something about it a long time ago, but can no longer recall the exact name of the drug.

He reaches towards the mouse on his computer, and begins to click a link that will take him to the online medical directory where he will find the answer he needs to cure your condition.

“Stop!”, you declare.  “That’s cheating!  If you can’t remember the name of that drug without looking it up, then what sort of doctor are you?  I want you to just remember it without looking it up.”

Of course, I imagine that if this situation were real you would be only too happy for the doctor to do whatever was required to find the cure for your disease.  You wouldn’t think twice about whether it might be considered “cheating” to look up the information needed to save your life… in fact you’d better hope that you have a doctor who a) knows there is an answer out there somewhere, and b) knows how to find it quickly.

I pondered this scenario today because I went to a dinner party with about 40 other people and we were presented with a trivia quiz on the table, something to keep us busy and entertained between food courses.  Being a celebration of Canadian Thanksgiving, the questions were all about Canada.  Now, I actually know quite a bit about Canada… I lived there for a year, travelled quite extensively through the historic eastern provinces, read a few books about Canadian history, and I have a Canadian girlfriend.  So I did know the answer to quite a few of the questions.

Of course, there were also questions I didn’t know the answer to.  And being the curious type who likes a challenge and to always learn more, I reached for my Nokia N95, pointed it to Google, and started looking for the answers to the questions I didn’t know.  If you have reasonable information literacy skills and can come up with good search keywords, finding answers to simple recall-style questions with Google is pretty easy.  In fact, you can usually find the answers just from the Google search results page without even going to the websites they link to.  It was not long before I had the elusive answers… in fact, I actually stumbled across the exact quiz that the questions were lifted from. Whoever put the quiz together had not changed anything, just used it directly from this website.  I casually copied down all the unknown answers onto the sheet and waited until it needed to be submitted.

Of course, when the sheets were finally collected and tallied, there was general astonishment that someone could have actually gotten all the questions 100% correct! A few people who knew what I’d done bandied about words like “cheating” and “unfair”.

For the record, I did not accept the prize – a lovely bottle of red wine – because I willingly admitted I had some help from my friends Mr Google and Mr Wikipedia, and I figured it would not have been fair to accept the prize.  I guess I just like to be a bit of a stirrer sometimes in order to make a point, even if only to myself.

But seriously, why do we build entire education systems based on rewarding people who can respond with the correct answers to questions, but then assume that any use of a tool to help them do this is cheating?   Why would a doctor in the scenario above get applauded for doing whatever was necessary to find an answer to the problem, but a student who does the same thing is considered a cheat.

If basic recall of facts is all that matters, a tool like Google can make you the smartest person in the room.  Today’s trivia quiz proved that.  If finding answers anywhere at anytime is a valuable thing to be able to do, then a mobile phone should be a standard tool you carry everywhere.

What I think people were really saying was that, if I was allowed to use my phone to find answers and everyone else wasn’t, then that would give me an unfair advantage.  And that may be true if I was the only person with access to Google, but the fact is that I didn’t do anything that every other person in that room could have done if they’d have chosen to.  The fact is, I was the only one in the room who used a tool that we all potentially had access to, but because I used that tool it made me a “cheat”.

And here’s the real point… mostly we ban these tools in our classrooms.  And we generally consider any student that uses such tools to find answers to our narrow questions to be a cheat.  And we drill into kids that when we ask them questions, when we set up those “exam conditions”, they better not even think about being “enterprising” or “creative” or “problem solvers”… Just know the answers to the questions, and show all your working too, dammit.

And you’d better hope that if one of those students ever grows up to be your doctor, the rigid thinking we may have instilled in them about “knowing the answers” has been replaced with a far more flexible skill for “finding the answers”.   Let’s hope that our kids don’t have too much trouble unlearning all the bizarre thinking that schools spend so much time drilling into them.

What do you think?  At what point does the ability to find answers cross the line and become cheating?

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Why is exceptional work treated as such an exception?

My daughter Kate, of whom I am incredibly proud, took part this morning in the 2008 Tournament of Minds. She was part of her school’s entry into the annual event, which is run as an activity for the kids in the school’s gifted and talented program.

The performance by the students was quite amazing.  For those of you unfamiliar with the Tournament of Minds event, the students are given a scenario to which they must respond.  This response is typically done in the form of a dramatic stageplay, but getting to the point of performing that stage play requires a huge amount of cross curricula learning to take place.  There is lots of behind the scenes research, teamwork, collaboration, literacy and creativity.  Teams must write, direct and produce the act, create all the props, and meet strict guidelines as to allowed times, materials and so on.

The scenario this year was that a famous author (chosen from a list of possible authors) had lost their memory. To try and reinstate the author’s memory they had to be visited by at least 5 of their more memorable characters.  Kate’s group chose Shakespeare.  So in the video below, you’ll see an amnesic William Shakespeare visited by Romeo and Juliet, Puck, Hamlet, Macbeth and Helena, who all do their best to bring back the Bard’s memory of himself and his work.

Here’s the video of the piece…  it’s about 8 minutes and the sound is sometimes a little soft, but is, I think, worth watching.

I think you’ll agree that the performance done by the students was clever, funny, insightful and creative.

These are students in Years 7 to 9 (ages 12 to 15) and what impresses me most is the fact that the study of Shakespeare does not typically take place in these years.  So, apart from a basic cursory knowledge of Shakespeare, these students pieced together this play, taking excerpts from a number of different plays and characters and combining them into a collective piece that I think works very well.  Not only that, they have managed to string the rest of it together with original writing and dialog that is inventive, rhyming, poetic and witty, and completely in keeping with the sorts of language that Shakepeare himself might have used.  The students had several meetings in school time, and also self-organised a Saturday to get together and watch some Shakespeare videos so they understood a little more about the characters and themes they ought to be tapping into.

Add to that the way they have written, memorised and performed the final piece, and I think you’d have to agree that it’s a pretty exceptional piece of work.  (And I say that not just because my daughter was in it… but she was the one playing Romeo in case you were wondering.)

But here’s the real question… why is this sort of thing the exception, and not the rule? Why do these sorts of activities only seem to exist in schools in the form of programs that take kids away from “normal lessons” so they can participate?  Surely, the sorts of skills and learning that take place in these kinds of activities are valuable on so many fronts that EVERY student could benefit from them, not just the so-called elite few that get chosen for gifted and talented programs?  While a handful of kids are withdrawn from regular classes to do things that are genuinely rich, cross-curricula, multi-literate learning experiences, the majority of kids stay in class and get bored to tears with textbooks and worksheets and subject-based teaching.  Where is the logic here?

If you look at all the truly great things that schools do with kids, so many of them are run outside the realm of regular “school”.  The things we do in “class” are so often the mundane, predictable and regimented stuff.  The really interesting stuff, the stuff that kids look back on and remember, the stuff that often defines who kids grow into in later life, is all this “other” stuff that is too often classed as “extra curricula”.  Dramatic performances, musicals, sporting events, art shows, fundraising events, computer programming competitions, online collaborative projects, and so on… why do schools consistently manage to treat the really interesting stuff as the added extras, rather than accepting that this is where so much of the truly valuable learning takes place.

The term “extra curricula” translates literally as “beyond school”.  How come our kids manage to do such amazingly great things, not because of school, but in spite of it?

When will we rethink school so that exceptional work stops being the exception, and instead become the rule?